Mariella Frostrup

I met Jason on a charity walk in 2001, and we got married on a friend's boat in Panama two years later. It was the perfect wedding for two people who'd already been married and who weren't teenagers.

Far too many girls' and women's romantic relationships are formed around a negation of their own worth and attributes rather than a confirmation of them.

Girls have a tendency to take responsibility for romantic misinterpretations, when often it's men whose perfectly honed emotional inscrutability makes life more complicated than it should be.

You only need to look at Jane Austen to see how crossed wires can become a defining aspect of romantic life. Then again, if the course of true love ran more smoothly, it would have a terribly detrimental effect on our cache of love stories.

Mixed messages are just part and parcel of the romantic terrain, and rather than berate yourself for any crossed wires, you'd do better to work on your future resilience.

While the male eye zooms in on a particular element to the exclusion of all else, a woman's gaze flickers from one tedious task to the next, to the point where we can't distinguish between the importance of mopping the kitchen floor and achieving world peace.

Like cars, every relationship requires a bit of an occasional service, and fine-tuning should be compulsory.

In romance, we feel the need to zoom in and expound on our partner's foibles in intimate detail; in friendship, we tend to do the opposite, avoiding confrontation through fear, lethargy or both.

Sustaining true friendship is a lot more challenging than we give it credit for.

Every friendship goes through ups and downs. Dysfunctional patterns set in external situations cause internal friction you grow apart and then bounce back together.

The sight of parents, children and grandparents all descending on a tented field to enjoy the pleasure of ideas and books renews my faith in humanity.

Contrary to popular mythology, the best and most durable relationships are based not on vulnerability or passion but on a conjugation of positive attributes, a meeting of mind, body and soul that is all the more powerful as it is not weighed down with neediness and unreasonable expectation.

Translating any insights I have for strangers' lives into positive action in my own has proved a challenge. While I've learned a lot about what everyone else is thinking, I fail miserably to use such knowledge in my private relationships.

Having a baby is a disaster for your career. I don't think there's any sympathy.

There are many ways to make the most of your time on the planet, and propagation of the species is just one of them. If you're convinced that it's the key to your happiness, there are routes open to you, whether with the help of modern medical science, marrying into a readymade one, or through fostering and adoption.

When I last looked, there weren't queues of eager guys under 40 hanging outside single ladies' doors begging them to give up work and have their babies. It takes two to tango and the same number, without medical help, to make a child.

We invest less in our friendships and expect more of friends than any other relationship. We spend days working out where to book for a romantic dinner, weeks wondering how to celebrate a partner or parent's birthday, and seconds forgetting a friend's important anniversary.

I recognise my old self in a lot of the letters I get from single women who are unrealistic about what they want.