Eaten bread, they say, is soon forgotten. In every society, changes for the better are rapidly assimilated and taken for granted. What was once an impossible dream quickly becomes a barely noticed aspect of reality. As we move on to the next impossible dream, we start to feel nostalgic for a past that, when we were living through it, we tended to despise.
Because the process of change in the Ireland of recent decades has been so dramatically foreshortened, our society experiences a particularly extreme version of this general phenomenon. Not just the distant past, but the day before yesterday, is wrapped in the soft, shimmering fabric of nostalgia.
Thus, in the generally rueful discussion of the fifth anniversary of the divorce referendum of November 1995, a very recent social development has been treated as if it belonged in the far distant past. Already the good old days of happy, stable Irish marriage before divorce and liberalism are forming themselves into a sepia-toned picture that we are all supposed to carry around in our heads. It is now almost taken as read that marriage and family life are sadly declining from a lovely old norm.
Yet if you reel the film back 30 years you get a very different picture. Go back to the innocent days of April 1967, for example, and dig out Joseph Cole's series of articles on "deserted wives" in the Evening Press. Cole points out that, in the absence of divorce legislation, many men were simply adopting an earlier version of the current solution to our abortion problem, the Feck Off to England policy.
Men, he wrote, were getting around the prohibition on divorce "by simply walking out on their wives and families and disappearing in the large industrial cities of Britain. This has become known as Divorce - Irish Style - nobody has yet dared publicly to put a name to it. The name is divorce."
Or take a look at a little book published by Mercier Press in 1969, Dorine Rohan's Marriage Irish Style. Rohan interviewed hundreds of married people. Her book is not a scientific survey, but an attempt to give an honest and unbiased impression of what Irish marriage was actually like.
The picture she presents of Irish marriage in the good old days is made up of absences: "lack of understanding and companionship, lack of an adult relationship between the two personalities, lack of education for marriage and how to run a home, lack of sensitivity, lack of communication. Probably the one thing not lacking is children, and too many children."
In rural Ireland she found many examples of married women who were "delighted with life" because their husbands did not drink and gave them whatever money was going. But she also found a deep well of sheer unhappiness.
She was initially surprised that many married countrywomen were willing to talk freely to her, until she realised that "they rarely had a chance to talk to anyone at length, much less about their problems".
Women who had some babies literally on their own "because himself was out drinking and I had no one to go for the doctor". Women of 42 who had been through 12 pregnancies and looked 62. Couples who never went anywhere together.
Many of the men she encountered felt that their wives had lost interest in them. What she describes is a vicious circle in which disappointed wives become lethargic and full of bitter resignation, husbands then find them uninterested and each, concluding that the other is a lost cause, sinks into silent resentment.
As for sex, some quotations from women interviewed by Rohan provide a sharp reminder of why the sexual revolution happened in the first place.
"Whoever said you were supposed to enjoy sex? Sure, aren't we all here to suffer, and the more we suffer in this life, the better it will be for us in the next." "Would you ever tell me what is an orgasm? Do you see stars and that sort of thing? I've never had one as far as I know."
"We've had four children in five years and we don't want any more for the moment, but my husband is very decent, he uses the withdrawal method."
Rohan writes that she encountered "in many cases a positive revulsion to the sex act. This revulsion I found not only in women, but some men I spoke with told me of their inhibitions which they felt would never be overcome." They performed the sex act as the result of an overpowering biological urge.
Not only is the world that Rohan describes a very recent one, but it still exists. Many of those lonely Irish couples, starved of companionship and affection, are still alive and still married. How strange it must be for them to see their continuing unhappiness now submerged in a new wave of nostalgia for the good old days of marriage Irish-style.
Let's remember, when we talk about the very real problems of the new Ireland, that it didn't emerge from nowhere. And, though the ideal may be as far away as ever, there is now less ignorance and more affection, less resignation and more mutual respect, less loneliness and more communication. If we have to be nostalgic about some time, why not the present?