Those of us who grew up in the long, dark shadow of the Sixties must, grudgingly, grant our groovy forebears some successes. An era that saw the dawn of feminism can’t be all bad. But it also left us some devastating cultural baggage. The worst, most evil ideology to have been spawned by the drug-addled decade is summed up, aptly, by the Beatles. “All you need is love.”

We have been bequeathed an idea that the ultimate goal is love; that the answer to the fundamental questions of the why and how of life are found in a ditzy, sugar-crusted fairytale. We have based an entire civilisation on the idealised pursuit of a temporary hormonal imbalance in the brain.

Women have, thankfully, been freed from the notion of divorce-less marriages and emancipated from economic dependence on men. But we have swapped a restrictive cage for a collective madness: an emphasis on romantic love at the expense of all else.

It is romantic love that persuades women to suffer abuse and torment. It is the grim determination to pursue the fairytale that induces women to accept the unacceptable. It is this primacy of love that allows Roxanne Meddings, whose boyfriend of one year is believed to have sexually assaulted her nine-year-old daughter before killing her and himself, to say: “I’m trying to be angry with him but I’m finding it really difficult because I loved him.”

Tracey Connelly, Baby P’s mother, talked of being “madly in love with the most amazing guy” as if this somehow excused the fact that “my fella is a bit nuts”. So Tracey, what first attracted you to the violent sociopath Steven Barker? As she wrote: “It’s funny when you meet someone and fall in love.” Hilarious.

Statistics about the abuse of children within the home are hard to come by and difficult to break down. An NSPCC study in 2000 found that 15 per cent of children surveyed were sexually abused by people they knew. Some 5 per cent had experienced abuse by strangers, although these figures cover everything from rape to flashing. There are no statistics kept about what percentage of these abuses are committed by itinerant boyfriends — perhaps because the numbers would sit uncomfortably with the notion that we can be selfish in our pursuit of love. A mother’s right to exciting sex with a new man is more important than her duty to keep her children safe.

It is a modern phenomenon to give love such primacy. Literature is full of lovers, but those who transgress other moral codes tend to die, tragically but inevitably. Those who give Jane Austen the status of high priestess of romance must never have actually read her — Austen’s heroines are realists. When did you fall in love with Mr Darcy, Jane Bennet asks Lizzie. “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

Love itself has always been celebrated; acting on that love regardless of the consequences for others has not. In Plato’s Symposium Socrates’ golden youths ask whether the base and ignoble soul can be capable of love. The true lover cannot demand of his love any actions that are contrary to other notions of honour and duty.

But in today’s hierarchy of values, love trumps duty, honour and respect. This is not a justification for forced marriages — the freedom to choose, and to stay with, a man is an inalienable cornerstone of women’s new-found liberation. But the pendulum has swung too far. The average cost of a wedding is £20,273. The fairytale ending is ruinously expensive. We choose the wedding over savings or housing. We’re in love with being in love.

Even today’s realists coat their motives in saccharine. Baroness Deech, head of the Bar Standards Board, this week said that London is the divorce capital of Europe. She said, rightly, that young girls are sent the message that they can make an easy fortune by marrying it. But she left out the bit where the fairytale must be validated by a spread in Hello!, with lashings of gush about love. No matter that the lover has a face like a frog and sleeps with prostitutes; he’s rich, so the fairytale has a happy ending. The frog prince is a Prince Charming, standing on his wallet.

I once, by mistake, went to a club where skinny orange women gather in packs to chase bored, arrogant footballers around a dancefloor. The modern fairytale is a hellish brew of plastic breasts and overpaid, overfêted sportsmen. Yet, when this bizarre mating ritual reaches its conclusion, they call it love.

The women who expect financial nirvana to accompany a normal marriage are delusional. The real problem when most marriages end is not splitting the assets but sharing the debts. It costs on average £28,000 to get divorced, a survey by Norwich Union found. Prudential says that the 2.76 million women retiring this year in the UK will expect to receive £6,642 a year less in their annual pensions than men.

Romantic love can mutate into something much richer — more profound but more difficult. The transition can be tricky. “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” would be different coming from a harassed, breast-feeding Juliet to a drunken Romeo stumbling in after a night on the lash with Mercutio.

Real love is my husband driving through rush hour to pick up my daughter and me because it’s raining. (Love is my husband making me laugh: “Don’t write that, it makes me sound like a butler.”) Any fool can be in love; but it is more effort to enact the big compromises and small kindnesses that make a relationship. Romance, like the Sixties, is utterly overrated.

Times Recommends

• We have kit and leadership. Let’s go
• Behind the scenes at the biggest deal
• Conferences — what a waste of money