My grandparents remained together for 55 years until Alexander’s death in 2017 – a bond virtually unheard of among the divorce-prone Gen X. They weren’t in love – or rather, they weren’t romantically in love, not at first anyway. Gen X – my mother’s generation – has a very different idea of what marriage ought to be. The Silent Generation – born, like my grandparents, between 1928 and 1945 – had marriage rates of 81 per cent. Marriages built on romantic love alone, they discovered, could not last.