Groucho Marx was, I believe, a comic genius; a linguistic virtuoso, offbeat, wacky and insanely funny. He was also rude, abrasive and these days he'd qualify as verbally abusive. In film after film Margaret Dumont was on the receiving end of his scathing humour. She would fall for his iconoclastic charm and we the audience would fall about laughing at the sheer improbability of plot and seduction.

Groucho remains a legend, not least for his inimitable one-liners, including the oft quoted: "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member." His bon mot came unbidden to my mind recently when I read an email from someone whose relationship pattern, with partners and friends, is one in which she is sought out and enters into a close, often exclusive, relationship. Yet, before too long, the other person in the relationship always turns on her.

"I kept thinking about it", she writes "and I know that there must be something essentially rotten within me to have me resonating with people like this in the first place. I wish I could extract whatever it is so that I would cease going through these emotionally painful experiences when these characters turn on me so viciously."

Somehow, she feels, the other person's bad behaviour must be her responsibility