What more feminine way could there be to celebrate the season of goodwill than listing everything you find most irritating about the man in your life? This is how 2,000 women have been occupying themselves in the run-up to Christmas, answering a survey about their requirements for the perfect male.
I don’t suppose it will have surprised many readers, of either sex to learn that not a single one of those questioned by Remington has found him yet.
Instead, the women have drawn up between them a charge sheet of the Top 20 unpardonable crimes that men aspiring to perfection must avoid.
There are few surprises here, either. Indeed, it’s an all-too familiar list of supposedly masculine shortcomings - many of which, I suspect, would have resonated as strongly with the average prehistoric cavewoman as they do with the girl-about-town of 2011.
You know the sort of thing: leaving nail clippings about the house/cave; being grumpy; breaking wind in her presence; not washing up; being lazy; not getting on with her family or friends; driving like a boy racer; paying too little attention to the children; leaving dirty washing/mammoth skins on the floor; not helping with the cooking; having unkempt facial hair or a bushy beard; watching too much sport; criticising her driving; going to the loo with the door open...
Snoring
All right, all right, it’s a fair cop. There can be very few men who could plead not guilty to every charge on the indictment. To be brutally honest, it is even possible that I may have committed one or two of these offences myself (although I’m not saying which).
Certainly, I’ve been accused in my time of some of the lesser offences mentioned in the survey, such as snoring like a McLaren F1 and pretending to listen when I’m not taking in a word of what’s said to me.
The only surprise there is that these alleged failings didn't make it into the Remington women’s Top 20 unforgivable imperfections. Clearly, some women are more forgiving than, ahem, others.
But while I’m prepared to accept that the perfect male may be something of a rarity, would it be very uncharitable to suggest that there are some characteristically feminine vices to which more than a few of the fairer sex may be prone?
Of course, I accept at once that unlike men, women are never grumpy or lazy, they never snore or break wind - and they always make heroic efforts to get on with their menfolks’ friends and family.
In the interests of domestic harmony this Christmas, I must also stress that in mentioning one or two of the imperfections of the human female, I am thinking of no particular woman. On the contrary, I write only in the most general terms.
With that disclaimer clearly understood, let me start with a feminine failing suggested by two of the complaints against men that appear in the survey’s Top 20. Indeed, the irony may have struck you, too (or perhaps not, if you happen to be a woman).
Enough to say that I would characterise the vice I have in mind as a certain difficulty in getting to grips with the concept of consistency.
The twin gripes that prompt this thought are: 1) men have an unforgivable tendency to criticise women’s driving; and 2) men have an unforgivable tendency to drive like boy racers.
Logical
So, you see, women have a perfect right to criticise men’s driving. But when a man has the audacity to criticise a woman’s driving, he places himself beyond redemption.
Oh, dear. Now that I’ve committed that last paragraph to cold print, I can see that it is, indeed, possible to maintain both those views simultaneously without violating the strict rules of logical consistency.
So to avoid a row that could go on until the crack of doom, let me concede the point at once, and move on swiftly to my second, and connected, complaint against women: you lot just won’t let an argument drop until you’ve secured total surrender - and sometimes not even then.
True, you may often tell your man, with a martyred look of mercy: “Let’s say no more about it.” But how often do you actually mean it? I’m thinking of a fine fellow - let’s call him Tim Otley - who once, in the very early weeks of his marriage, happened to trip on the stairs up from the kitchen while he was carrying two plates heaped high with spaghetti bolognese.
Look, I grant you that the effects of his fall were dramatic in the extreme: spaghetti draped everywhere, broken crockery all over the floor, acres of wall stained with mince and tomato.
But can you believe that even now, nearly 32 years on, this poor chap’s wife still tells him almost every time spaghetti is on the menu: “Now, be careful not to drop it!”
Then there’s that womanly weakness for embarrassing her man in public.
Let’s say, as a purely hypothetical example, that a journalist is on his way to work one morning, with his wife sitting next to him on the train, when he asks for her thoughts on a survey of masculine vices.
Who but a woman would answer, for everyone in the carriage to hear, “Oh, yes, I saw that story. I must say it’s absolutely disgusting when I find your toenail clippings all over the bedroom carpet”?
Affront
Other female vices? I could go on for ever: packing enough clothes for a month, on that weekend city break to Amsterdam; talking to her mother on the telephone for an hour and a half, and then answering “Nothing, really” when you’re asked what the old girl has to say; tidying your man’s briefcase away, and then taking it as a personal affront when you’re asked where you’ve put it; despising your husband for chuckling at the cult TV cartoon South Park; referring to the dog as the “doggy”...
But enough! If I go on like this, I’ll fall foul of the Coalition’s politically correct new law against “emotional abuse”, under which husbands and wives may be dragged before the courts for anything from verbal abuse of their spouses to isolating them from their friends or denying them access to the telephone.
So let me end on a conciliatory note, in the true spirit of the season, and deliver a pious little sermon on the institution of marriage.
Yes, as I can vouch from more than three decades of experience, men are always likely to find a thousand little things to irritate them about their wives, just as women could fill volumes with their complaints about their husbands’ little ways.
And to those who contemplate matrimony in the belief they will be able to cure all their other half’s vices and make them perfect, I would advise second thoughts.
Indeed, I’ve long thought it one of the great tragedies of our age - and by far the biggest single cause of marital breakdown - that young people these days have ridiculously high expectations of an institution that has always been hard work.
But, my God, it’s worth sticking at it, and learning to live with each other’s imperfections. For life holds no happiness like it. Honest. - Daily Mail