Talking to a couple of friends online last night I had an epiphany. Neither of the lovely ladies was particularly happy, and the root of both their unhappiness was, typically, a man. To clarify, these are two very beautiful, very intelligent, funny, independent women. The menfolk in their lives were screwing them around, making things unclear and more complicated than necessary, and generally acting like eejits.

I know that this is not relationship behaviour particular to a specific age group, but looking at my friends, male and female, there seem to be a lot more minefields in the long-term relationship field within my peers than there were, say, for our parents. Over the last 20 months I have heard more tales of ended longterm love affairs and jilted brides than had I read Harlequin’s entire back catalogue (yes, I exaggerate – it’s my job!)! I cannot speak for the rest of the world, but Britain appears to have bred a generation of men who cannot committ.

And it isn’t their fault!

I say that we have bred these menfolk, because that’s the truth. We nurture the bigger, better, faster stronger myth – we serve everything in bite-size chunks, whether it’s TV shows broken down for advertising or the advertising itself, the micro-bite news-sharing of twitter or KFC popcorn chicken! We preach that nothing sticks – and nothing is worth sticking for – we’re always moving on to the Next Big Thing.

And thanks to this faster-than-a-speeding-bullet culture, everything is given a shelf life. Install Firefox more than six months ago? Bah – you need v3.5! New iPhone for Christmas? Please, let us upgrade you! Women in the media are nipped and tucked, paid to lose or gain weight at the drop of a hat (who could forget the rumours of the female cast of Ally MacBeal being told to lose weight to make Calista look less skinny?), airbrushed and slimmed down to within a hair’s breadth of reality – all of which leads men to believe that “perfection” does actually exist. We sit back in our Bridget Jones big knickers and miracle suits and laugh smugly at previous generations who altered the perception of their true shape through whalebone corsets, hoops and bustles, never even recognising our own hyopcrisy. Men have been trading their women in for younger models for centuries (I’m looking at you Henry VIIIth!), but in a post-feminist generation we’re moving away from the blame game and back towards accepting it. Something about that doesn’t quite fly…

Maybe it’s evolution. Maybe we’re evolving in the direction of so many in the animal kingdom, where the male roams free, sowing his wild oats, while the females collectively raise their young. It works for lions…

But I can’t help but wonder whether it’s coincidence that this generation of non-committal men happens to arrive in conjunction with the first lab production of human sperm. I understand that this experimentation is an exercise in overcoming infertility and NOT a question of “producing human life in a dish” – but that doesn’t mean the possibilities aren’t there. There’s something dreadfully masculine dystopic about the whole set-up…

So, I’ve been wondering whether it isn’t about time we let the lads loose – turned them back to the wild and let them go do their hunting, gathering and sowing. In many ways, we’ve emasculated them enough – by coming out of the kitchen and stepping all over their hob-nail-booted toes (it’s hardly their fault if their pretty little footsies aren’t as tough as we thought they were!), as well as by scientifically rendering their very being obsolete. Turn ‘em loose, I say – they get their way, and I’m sure we could find a way to get ours when necessary, what with the roaming oat-sowing and all!

(To clarify, as I type this I’m seeing some sort of Jurassic Park type set up with electric fences and on-site Doctors and man-specialists to keep an eye on of the well-being and fertility of our “free-roaming” captives… naturally without the unexpectedly deadly turn of events requisite to Crichton’s thrillers.)

Meanwhile, we could place the emphasis firmly back on the most important relationships in our lives – our families, yes, and especially our girl friends. Afterall, they’re the ones who are with us through thick and thin. Somewhere along the way we’ve lost a simple truth: men come and go, but girlfriends last a lifetime. It’s time we re-realised that fact.