At a holiday party last night, a friend was pondering aloud his recent bad luck with relationships. Four women in a row, he lamented, have broken up with him this year. In each case, she was the only person he was seeing; he never two-timed. And in each case, he thought everything was going along just fine until pretty much out of the blue - or so it seemed to him - he was abruptly told, "Things aren't working out for us anymore" and "I'd rather just be friends" and (twice) "I think I need my freedom."

Troy is a thoroughly nice guy - at least, as far as I can tell from twelve years of having known him: albeit never having known him, let's be clear, in the biblical sense. He's 37, educated, employed, and amusing. Why oh why does he keep getting tossed out?

I think Troy is a victim of a mindset that sneaked up on society and seized it: a chronic restlessness, an endemic dissatisfaction born of a bit too much instant gratification. A lot of powerful forces out there want us to believe that whatever we have isn't good enough, isn't exciting enough, and just plain isn't enough. This is what happens when we live in a consumer culture in which everything is viewed more or less like shopping - and a nihilistic, exhibitionistic, short-attention-spanned intellectual culture that blares nonstop: Are we having fun yet?! The effect is that way too many of us feel, way too often, that we're missing out. That we're stuck. That our stable relationships aren't Rocks of Gibraltar but oppressive, repressive and unimaginative. So at the slightest glint of discontent, we chuck what we have and look elsewhere. We eye our perfectly good partners and think, anguished: Out of two billion options, I chose you?