I WAS thumbing through my anthology of singles columns and chuckling at the humorous nuggets within when I noticed something troubling.

It seemed all of my creative juices had been focused on attracting women by highlighting my qualities. I hadn’t even looked at any of my glaring deficiencies.

Maybe I could attract a playmate simply by being less annoying than other men.

Dreaming about the action I would get as a completely inoffensive person, I flicked through the Sunday papers, which are always littered with surveys of what women hate about men.

The first my eye fell on claimed what eats away at the core of every woman is a toilet seat that has been left up.

Easy to rectify, I thought, looking down the long list of allegations women in this survey had lodged about their male counterparts.

“And women wonder why their relationships break up,” I thought ruefully, imagining the endless nagging these poor men probably had to endure.

I looked back to my own experience of domestic bliss and I could certainly remember being told off a lot after we first moved in together but later my brain managed to convert this annoyance into mere background noise.

I maintain I was relatively considerate and tidy, but my girlfriend was infinitely more so. Not deranged in any other way, I could see her wince if a coaster was put back incorrectly; if it wasn’t at a right angle, it was a wrong angle.

Sometimes, in the midst of a row, I would ruffle her coffee table magazines, maybe even sprinkle some crumbs if I was particularly upset.

Invariably in any household the tidiest person will end up doing more of the work and quietly grow to hate the lazier members.

I have been on the other side and lived with filthy housemates who have been the bane of my life. Sometimes I worried I would find myself sweeping their droppings into small, manageable piles. It was like living with truckers.

Admittedly this student accommodation was pretty terrible before we moved in, but it was little improved by week-old kebab wrappers and sticky, nondescript splatters on the floor.

I still remember hearing crunching under my feet as I walked the short distance from the bathroom to my bedroom.

I had to go to my girlfriend’s for a shower before I felt clean again.

Being nagged and nagging are both tiring and for this reason I don’t think I will house-share again. A friend of mine shares this selfish bent that comes with age, but has chosen to inflict it on others.

I went over to his flat the other day.

As I arrived he was casually tossing the three saucepans he had dirtied into the sink and turned his back on a filthy fat-draining machine.

We walked into the living room where I was greeted by a huge pile of his girlfriend’s work notes and her shoes, that had clearly been kicked off and left.

Next to these was an overflowing ashtray stuffed with his fag ends and empty crisps packets against the backdrop of a clothes horse covered in his pants like some kind of bizarre conversation piece.

“Unbelievable,” he said, pointing to an inoffensive collection that seemed to consist of two pens and a packet of mints belonging to his housemate. “I wish he would clean up after himself”.