Modern Love: an intimate history of men and women in twentieth-century Britain Marcus Collins Atlantic Books, 294pp, £19.99 ISBN 1903809215

The thing I find most remarkable about internet romances, speed dating, singles club nights and so on is their popularity with 22-year-olds. These girls are thinking ahead. Buggered if they're going to get caught out like Carrie Bradshaw: they have spotted disaster over the horizon and will do anything to prevent it. Women have always had a knack for forward planning in areas that matter to them. Earlier generations devoted this talent to not getting pregnant, and those earlier still to ensuring that their card was marked before a ball. The task today remains to make sure we do not wind up single.

If you had to describe the state of modern relations between men and women to a visitor from the late 19th century, the dating industry in its various forms would figure large in your account. Talk of love has turned largely into a public discussion about its absence. Twenty, even ten, years ago, the problem was perceived to be love's demise (ie, divorce), but now the concern is with get-ting it started in the first place.

At a public level, the problem of the singleton tends to be discussed in practical, mechanistic terms - my neighbour cannot get a date because she is a thirtysomething teacher who works excessively long hours, has been deceived by a mirage of infinite fertility, and fatally lost the art of compromise in her twenties when low interest rates afforded her a mortgage by herself. But at a private level, it is put down to personal failings - my neighbour can't get a date because she is a neurotic, over-demanding bore. None of these stereotypical responses questions why we are so worried about her, or what impact this could be having on women's lives.

It is easy to invoke statistics to account for the shift of public attention from relationships to singles. A lot of people are single today. Far and away the biggest problem with being single is "BEING SINGLE", and if my marriage ended tomorrow I would be in exactly the same situation as my neighbour, regardless of respective neuroses or working hours - or, crucially, how either of us felt about being by ourselves.

Our problem would be less the lack of a partner than the oppression of other people's rather nasty presumptions about us. Fifty years ago, it was the public disgrace, more than the material difficulties, that made divorce or illegitimacy a misery. We are now relaxed about these things. But nobody wants to be a single thirtysomething woman today because it is considered to be a nightmare of desperation - and so it is.

For that matter, being a single twentysomething is increasingly difficult. The carefree window of romance between Clearasil and Oil of Olay will at this rate turn out to have been no more than a progressive blip. Like a free education, we took it for granted as a piece of irreversible social progress, never dreaming that we'd been lucky to get in under the wire before it was redefined as an unaffordable luxury.

Is anything to be done about this? Probably not, if we keep speed dating. Marcus Collins has produced a far more useful contribution to this modern dilemma by writing a history of relations between men and women through the 20th century. The narrative is one of competing ideas, and it is an enlightening approach, because gender relations are not merely a matter of public policy, economics and technology - nor of the sort of personality flaws found in problem pages. They can be meaningfully understood only as ideas that have been shaped by opinions, and which in turn shape our lives.

Collins charts the progress of a radical turn-of-the century idea that men and women could achieve joyful intimacy if only they got to know each other as equals. This "mutualism" rejected the arch-Victorian view that man was master, and that happiness was achieved by the sexes leading segregated lives in strictly defined gender roles. It also disagreed with the suffragettes, who saw men as the enemy and female autonomy as the solution. Mutualism held that men and women were different, but complementary.

Pioneered by intellectuals and reformers such as George Bernard Shaw and Marie Stopes, this idea was pursued through co-education, contraception, and so on. By the mid-century, its advocates had succeeded in redefining marriage - in aspiration, at least - as a romantic partnership to be cherished, not a patriarchal institution to be borne. But the anticipated prize of harmony proved to be elusive. Equality turned out to be a hazardous caper, fraught with conflict and doubt, and mutualism spent the second half of the century wrestling not only with revived assaults from both flanks of the sex war, but also with itself, confused by how a remedy for loveless marriage ended up encouraging so much divorce.

What emerges is the striking familiarity of so many of mutualism's arguments. Even after what looks like monumental progress, the basic polarities in the debate - and their internal tensions - are essentially the same. In 1929, Lord Rothermere thought universal suffrage for women was the limit. The Daily Mail, of which he was chairman, is still chasing those limits a century later, redrawing each line with the same finality. Mutualists between the wars were torn over the question of "whether men should henceforth aspire to achieve women's degree of continence, or whether women should be free to descend to men's lower level" - which sounds uncannily like the post-feminists' dilemma over whether to applaud or despair of ladettes and their drunken sexual adventures.

The new porn magazines of the late 1960s "refused to divorce readers' sexuality from their other interests . . . instead presenting an integrated package of features and pictorials structured around a sexual theme". Targeted at "tomorrow's man", a James Bond-style sophisticate with tastes for cool clothes and fast cars, the pictorials of Mayfair and Men Only "provided women to be attracted to, the consumer columns told men how to attract them, and the sexology coached them in matters of attitude and technique". Collins's description of these publications is so perfect a precis of 1990s lad mags that it is hard to believe it wasn't stolen from an early draft proposal for Loaded.

Thus Collins elegantly demonstrates the power of public perception in determining whether or not we manage to be happy in love. If, at the start of a century when women allegedly have it all, everyone is having the same arguments that were going round when women did not even have the vote, then progress is obviously not going to come from changing the law. We will have to change our minds instead.

This is evidently less easy than it sounds. But internet dating is not going to save women from the scourge of spinsterhood. Divorce was ultimately rescued from shame by women's refusal to accept disgrace with their divorcee status. If we do not want to end up back in our great-grandmothers' shoes, with life confined from adolescence to a scheme to get a man, the same will have to be done for singlehood.

Decca Aitkenhead is the author of The Promised Land: travels in search of the perfect E (Fourth Estate)

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