The newspaper Malta Today carried out a survey to find out what people think of as the main reasons for marital breakdown. Top of the list was – you guessed it – the high price of property. Not infidelity, not incompatibility, not lack of commitment or abysmal communications skills, not men behaving like sex-starved kids in a sweet-shop full of women on the make, not bored housewives having a cheap fling and imagining they’re Madame Bovary – no, most people think that couples break up because they’re fed up of the stress and strain of paying off the mortgage. If only life were so simple.

Some couples might crack up under the strain of a bank loan that is far too big to be sensible, taken out for a home that is what they want, rather than what they need and can afford. But most of them? I hardly think so. I know that the majority of young Maltese adults have virtually no exposure to what being a grown-up is all about, because they live their lives in a sheltered little nest feathered by mummy.

Surely, though, they don’t end up running around in bars aged 40 trying to pick up 20-year-old girls (the men) or sex-texting – also called sexting – other women’s husbands (the women) because when they married, mummy and daddy didn’t buy them a three-bedroom maisonette, and so they ended up having to pay for it themselves instead of going on holiday and buying lots of clothes.

Come on. Let’s grow up here. There are two main reasons why Maltese marriages break down. The first is that too many people think that love is a feeling, rather than an act of commitment and of consistently caring behaviour. They wake up one morning and think that they’ve fallen out of love. They start another relationship and after a few years, guess what, they’ve fallen out of love again. What they don’t realise is that all relationships reach that stage. If you don’t accept or understand this, you will end up having a series of five- or ten-year relationships until you wind up alone.

Most of the people who think like this are men (what a surprise). They run off because they want to be in love or to find their one true love – or so they say, being unable to distinguish between what they feel with their heart and what they feel in their loins. What they really mean, of course, is that they want to feel lust again, and more importantly, they want to be free to act on it.

Not all men are like this, obviously – allahares, because that would be a pretty pickle for us women. The men who are not like this are madly attractive to other women, and some of these other women try to loosen the marital bond so that they can have this desirable creature for themselves. This creates a contradiction for them: if their efforts are successful, they have proven that he is not what they thought he was and why they wanted him in the first place: stable, loyal and faithful. They are left with the horrible suspicion that what he has done to his wife he may very well do to them one day. And in fact, he usually does.

So there you have it, men: the best way to ensure you are very attractive to other women is to be devoted to your wife. Tough, but it’s the truth. The best way to be unattractive to women, on the other hand, is to run around trying to pick them up in bars, unless you are under 30, in which case this makes you attractive, but only if you are very handsome, drive a smart car, earn lots of money and are generally talented, with a pleasant personality and are good at conversation, which means not talking about yourself all the time, or any of the time.

Lots of women think that love is a feeling too, but these are usually the ones who have too much time on their hands and too little else to think about. They write Danielle Steel novels in their heads with themselves as the heroine, and then they try to act them out in real life, except the man that they get to act out with is not some steely-jawed billionaire with the gifts of Leonardo da Vinci, but the tennis partner, or the golf pro, or the man behind the cheese counter. Women are on the whole programmed to accept low standards in men and to make the best of what they’ve got. That’s why we stand there politely at cocktail parties while men with dandruff on their shoulders and pastizzi crumbs stuck to their lips spit gobbets in our faces as they bore us with monologues about themselves, themselves, themselves, not even making eye contact or worse, making too much.

The difference, with women who want to feel lust again (lust, remember that?) is that instead of liberating themselves from the marital nest so as to shack up with a yes-sir-anything-you-want-sir citizen of a ramshackle economy, as men do, they sleep with a friend or colleague of their husband, or somebody they met at the tennis club, and hope that their husband doesn’t find out. And then he does and he walks out. Or worse, he stays in the guest bedroom while the long-drawn-out separation process goes through the courts. Or even worse than that, he “forgives” her, and then spends the next 20 years reminding her about it and using it to take the moral high ground, or as a stick to beat her with whenever she complains about anything.

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And the second main reason for marital break-up? It’s people not having enough fun before they get married, and then trying to have it afterwards. They’re serious and conservative throughout their teenage years, get middle-aged spread of the spirit when they’re in their early 20s, don’t do any exploring of any kind, and then they get married after a lengthy gherusija in which they haven’t done much because they’re too busy saving every cent for the marble flooring in the hall and the Lm6,000 kitchen. Then after a few years – bang! – one of them wakes up to the fact that life is damned short and tries to make up for lost time. This making up for lost time doesn’t involve the spouse, but rather the opposite, because it is an attempt at going back to the time before there was a spouse, and trying to rewrite history. It becomes an exercise in regression to a youth unlived to the full, and trying to relive it, this time fully.

So you see men behaving like complete idiots, embarrassing their children by hanging out at the same bars and making themselves the object of gossip, laughter and ridicule among their children’s friends. They don’t realise it, of course. They think they’re dudes, that the 20-year-olds accept them as one of their own, even if they are 45. Talk about self-delusion and the horrid stink of ageing desperation.

Some months ago I asked one of my sons why he and his friends no longer went to bar X. The answer I got put things into perspective for me: “Because all those disprati started going there and put us off – men about daddy’s age trying to pick up the girls and women your age acting like idiots and wearing their daughters’ clothes. They don’t leave any space for us. They see a bar and they have to invade it, thinking they’re 20. They spoil everything, and it’s really embarrassing for their kids.”

Then I remembered how we used to feel at 17, about the rare separated women of 35 or so who used to come down to St Julian’s for a drink wearing the corsets and ruffles that were fashionable in 1982. We thought they were sad and desperate. We thought they were so old. We thought that if our mothers did that, we would lock them up and not allow them out. And as for our fathers: the very idea of seeing them trying to pick up a “chick” our age while we were at the same bar didn’t bear thinking about.

Nothing changes in this respect, but today’s middle-aged people who never had fun when they were young, and those who have never stopped having fun of the 20-year-old kind because they are scared of growing up, don’t want to accept the fact that they are middle-aged. Shall I shout it out, loud and clear? Middle-aged. You’re middle-aged, so get used to it. Another few years and you’ll be old. That’s right, old. If you’re already ridiculous now, what are you going to be like then?

These people have allowed their marriages to hit the rocks because they haven’t yet found out – or they have found out too late – that you can never make up for lost time. What’s gone is gone. You can never be 20 again. You can put on all the small tight skirts you like, you can shrink yourself to a size 8, you can beat your brains out at the gym, you can streak and highlight your grey hair, you can flirt with any number of men, but at the end of the day what you will look like is a 45-year-old woman who is a size 8, with dyed hair, wearing inappropriate clothes and trying to get off with anyone who will have her.

The same goes for the men. Please don’t kid yourself that because you were a heart-throb at 20 you are still one at 45, because you are definitely not. You have probably lost most of your hair, your face is wrinkled, you are out of shape, and your son is much, much better-looking than you are. Worst of all, you have lost the little charm you once had and your conversation is boring. When you drive past, women say: “Nice car, shame about the driver.” Those young girls aren’t chatting you up and admiring you. They’re laughing at their friend’s sad dad and pitying their friend for what she has to put up with. Don’t make matters worse by walking into the bar with their other friend’s equally sad mum, dressed like a New York streetwalker, and the two of you behaving as though you’re hanging around the parked cars on a Saturday evening near Il-Fortizza, circa 1978. It’s too much and you look like fools. Believe me. You do.

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Some marriages break up because one partner is a nasty piece of work. Others break up because the two are incompatible. But the vast majority don’t last because the people in them are suffering from a bad case of arrested emotional development. They just can’t grow up, and this makes them lousy husbands and wives, and even lousier parents. How can you live with a man whose main preoccupation is whether he is still attractive to women? How can you live with a woman who is forever competing with her daughter or flirting with her friends’ husbands? How can you respect a parent who’s running around the bars trying to pick up your friends, or having one-night stands with your friend’s mother or father? You can’t. The parents who behave like this should ask themselves whether they would have liked to have the sort of parents they are now, and if the answer is the resounding No that it almost certainly is, they should take that on board and realise that their own kids feel the same way. Teenagers want to be able to despise their parents for being boring and out of date, and not for having sex all over the shop.

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The high cost of property has nothing to do with the collapse of marriages. Leaving aside the marriages that break down because of incompatibility, utter boredom, rotten communication, violence, gambling or drunkenness, the chief reason why many marriages shatter is the distress caused by the sheer idiocy of one or both partners: the “love is a feeling” and “I want to be in love and recapture my youth” brigade. They’ll still be looking for love when they’re 60 and 70, because what they’re looking for is a feeling and nothing else. But with luck, by then they’ll have joined a prayer group and found God.