These days no young person can afford to fall in love, what with the incredible rise in the pr*** of h***es. Couples will be bedding down, perforce, in their parents' gaffs, rearing their children in granny's front room. Stillorgan will become a slum, everyone will be on their hind legs about middle-class overcrowding and the rise in domestic incidents involving Habitat pasta tongs. "Mother-in-law beaten to death with carton of Tropicana" will be the headline. "Young family forced to sleep on three-piece suite, with really awful old-fashioned design. Child gets rash."
Just when we thought everything was going to be all right, here's something to be miserable about, thank God. Just when we had got everything a grown-up needs for the pursuit of true love (contraception, divorce, anti-cellulite cream, a decent local creche), history rears its ugly head. Articles are written, legislation is demanded, and we all jump up and down in the hope that, just for once, we can get the economics of love right. Just for once.
Of course we don't mention the love bit - just the economics. We don't want to look silly, now do we? Because Ireland may have a romantic history, but we certainly do not have a history of romance. We didn't believe in it in the 1940s, being far too poor - love was something Patrick Pearse felt for his mother, and sex in a proper bed was something you had to emigrate for. In the trap of the 1950s, love was new lino, the perfectly turned fairy-cake and 75 wet nappies on a line in February. Sex may have arrived in the 1960s, but everyone knew it was actually something foreigners did and Gay Byrne talked about. There was a brief heyday in the 1970s, throwing off the shackles of sexual repression - Leeson Street, the rise of the Married Man - but by then the women were getting stroppy and the men confused ("It's just a Band-aid, for God's sake, have you never seen a cut finger before?"). By the 1980s, the gender war had arrived.
Of course, Irish women were far too nice to turn the office in the kind of war-zone you still find in America, or England. ("For such an oppressed group of people," as Louis MacNeice remarked, "Irish women are very relaxed.") No, we went to the pub and had a good time instead, slagged the guys and got off with them by accident and weren't repressed at all. But secretly women were ringing up the radio and sex (never mind love) became something appalling. Sex was something that made you cry, as they finished the court report and paused for the Angelus. No wonder that in the 1990s young people of various anatomies are Good Friends and hug each other before they get in the sack. This isn't love, it's the Babes in the Wood, it's "Who left us here on our own?" and "What's going on?"
If you listened into the national conversation, the articles, the novels and chat shows, you would think that Ireland moved straight from sexual repression to sexual dismay - like a one night stand, without the fun bit in between (apart from that great party in Leeson Street in 1975).
The truth is, of course, that everyone has their own decade. In fact, you can get through the whole history of Irish romance in the course of a good weekend. Saturday mornings are good for that 1950s feel: the pop of the toaster, the burble of the radio, the hum and spin of the washing machine. The 1960s can be found looking at the lacy bits in the lingerie department of Clery's, when the person beside you turns out to be a nun buying a new girdle (quel frisson). The 1970s are alive and well and brawling up and down O'Connell Street, a space so devoted to group therapy it should get a grant, a place of license and rage and working it all out, snogging and fighting and going off with the wrong person the middle of the night. The 1980s can happen anytime, and usually involve a discussion about whose turn it is to do the washing up.
The problem for the next decade (apart from the appalling rise in the pr*** of h***es), is what to do about men. Apparently they are in crisis. Men, who used to be the victims of history, are now the victims of women, and the national conversation grinds on. It is not a romantic conversation.
It is not that Irish men are not sentimental. They are famous for it. In the past they were sentimental about home, nation, their mothers - and about women, insofar as they reminded them of the above. In these more troubled times, they are sentimental about their children, and once more women are left out of the loop. Women, on the other hand, are allowed to be a bit silly. Women have always known that love has nothing to do with history and everything to do with getting fat. We have always known that two people is the entire world, that, when you are in love, gender is not a problem at all.
Love smashes everything. It ignores boundaries. It defies politics, morality and economic necessity. It is a disaster. No wonder we make contracts to try to organise the incredible force of it, to have it and schedule it and still get to the supermarket on time. No wonder we keep talking, and trying to make it fair. It isn't fair. Neither is it silly - no matter how many pink hearts and roses we throw at it. The bare fact is, there's nothing you can do about love, so you might as well be sentimental as whine about it.
Sentiment is a recent invention. It arrived in the 18th century and was closely tied to the cult of the family: it was also linked to ideas of liberty and to the middle classes. The Irish got the liberty bit, and certainly got the family bit. Now, we have the middle classes. We finally have the money to be sentimental. We have talked these things through. We have choice. All I am saying is, we have at least six months before men withdraw to communes; at least four months before pregnant couples start emigrating somewhere cheap. We have that little window in the historical schedule where we can engage, politically, patriotically, in high romance. We can have a smashing time. We can pick up the pieces later. We can be innocent, properly innocent, one more time.
Anne Enright is currently writer fellow at Trinity College, Dublin, where she also lectures. She recently participated in the group novel Finbar's Hotel