That’s one snapshot of one room. Multiply by seven billion and you’ll see why I spend every evening marvelling that I have survived another day without having a stroke.

Women, of course, get most of the bad press when it comes to rowing. Men, in the stereotypical formation, occasionally explode with towering furies over large and important matters. Women (in the ditto) are more frequently annoyed by so-called minutiae. We are the ones who niggle and poke and prod and whine and berate all day… We are the ones, in short, who nag. We are the ones responsible for the bulk of those 312 annual arguments.

But why do we nag? It’s because we can see further into a brick wall than the average man. It’s because we see not just A Single Thing but all the consequences that flow from that thing. If the windows are never opened, we will get damp and mould in our tiny kitchen. If pans and hobs are left to burn repeatedly, we will have to replace them. This is boring, expensive and completely avoidable.

So is burning down the house. So is being fined by the DVLA and the Inland Revenue. So is finding those sodding papers. Never eating vegetables will encourage particularly horrible cancers to take up residence in your body and you might die. Which, although it might not seem like it as I advance upon you with endless lists of daily complaints, I really do not want you to do.

Of course, he has his complaints about me. I’m disgustingly messy and I baffle and annoy him by worrying about things beyond my control. (I’m trying to improve the former, I can do nothing about the latter.)

But these things don’t wound him like the things I nag about (or ‘repeatedly request in an admirably reasonable tone of voice in the circumstances’, as I prefer to think of it) do me. Because when people refuse to change their behaviours, it can only be interpreted negatively. Either they don’t care that they are upsetting you, or they are congenitally thoughtless or too stubborn to be swayed by legitimate argument even when you back it up with evidence printed off the web (as I once did re: the boiling water/air issue). Those 312 moments are the tip of the iceberg. The real question is how long your relationship has before it founders on the seveneighths that lurk beneath the surface.

Waiter, another bottle of sorrowdrowner, if you would…

Contact Lucy Mangan at lucy.mangan@stylist.co.uk and on twitter.com/lucymangan

Picture credit: Rex Features

"Why women get the blame for rows"