Kitty is 24, the eldest of several girls. She lives in the family home with generous, kind but ultraconservative parents who are horrified at the thought of her going to live with her boyfriend, Tony. Her parents regard this as not only sinful, but also as giving bad example to her sisters and selling herself short. She will go and live with him, she says, but wants advice on how to do it causing the least hurt.
Coming up to the end of the next century, if they still have problem pages, there will be people writing in saying that they are in love with a Martian and want to go off and colonise a new planet, but that their parents, who had hopes of a nice, safe job in a space station in Venus, don't agree.
And the elders of the tribes will shake their heads or whatever they have to shake and will say how easy it all was a hundred years ago when no one had such terrible decisions to make.
People have had to make decisions for ever: which caveman, which club to wield, which wild beast to kill today. It's never made easier by having more choice. It's made much more difficult.
When I was Kitty's age, living, as she does, in suburban Dublin, I could count on the fingers of one hand the 24-year-olds living with their boyfriends. And, while I might have been able to do a reasonable count of girls of that age who had sex with their boyfriends, this was always a huge and well-guarded secret. What parents knew or suspected was never really discussed, and, since they were so old and out of touch and had obviously never known any feeling of desire themselves, their thoughts on such matters were irrelevant. But not their authority. That was very relevant indeed.
And, even though Kitty and Tony would have been over 21 and legally entitled to make their own choices, the heavy frowns of shock, shame and disapproval would have been a huge burden, and would in most cases have ended in an irreparable family rift. Very few conventional parents, coming from their own greatly restricted upbringing, would honestly have been able to take such an arrangement on board then.
Some, in order to keep the peace, might have turned a blind eye and pretended that the young people were living in different establishments. Only a few exceptionally tolerant and far-seeing souls might have been able to realise that it was, after all, the young couple's own business; their lives, their choices. But that was then and this is now. Kitty's parents don't have the weight of a threatening church as well as stern public opinion. In their hearts they may truly believe that right is right and wrong is wrong and no number of years passing can ever change this. They could think that the lowering of standards, defined as liberalism, may be the thin end of the wedge, and that, unless society fights hard to keep the rules that have served it for generations, everything will disintegrate.
They can point out that selfishness and putting pleasure before duty has resulted in a huge number of ills; they could say, with a lot of truth, that sex alone is not going to make anyone permanently happy. They might say that those who live together before marriage are more likely to separate later - a "statistic" out of fresh air which they may well believe.
There may be many people brought up in the 1950s and early 1960s who would love to support a daughter like Kitty, who still wants their approval and endorsement, but who cannot morally do so.
Your letters were evenly divided about this, many urging Kitty to think again, a lot of those believing that that it was Tony who was calling the shots, and not realising that she too might want a period of preparation.
There was also a great number urging the Irish solution to the Irish problem, advising either saying nothing or living so far from home that scandal and personal friction is minimised.
There were also letters from younger people who didn't know what we were talking about.