Remember folks: A dishwasher can destroy a healthy relationship

Herself should be doing the dishes, so she rigged it that a machine does it instead. But it’s very definitely HER machine, and a decent man wouldn’t lower himself to get involved with it

PUT three women in one room. Put three men in another room in the same house. Then ask yourself in which room a) more chocolate gets eaten, and b) the rugby match is playing.

The guys surfaced late on Saturday evening, offering to make coffee for the three women. Or tea. Or even herbal tea. (Only a man in the grip of serious good humour ever offers to make herbal tea.)

“I assume we won?” one of the women asked.

“Oh, no, we lost,” was the contented answer. “But we played really, really well.”

None of the three women said what we were thinking. What’s to be orgasmic about if your team lost? And don’t, we thought but didn’t say, don’t give us that playing fields of Eton lark about the issue not being about winning or losing but how the game was played.

The strange thing is the three men, in their day jobs, are red-in-tooth-and-claw entrepreneurs. If, at the end of the financial year, one of them made a loss and a department head reporting to him said, “But we worked really, really well during the year, never mind not making profits, you should be breaking out the champagne and smiling on us all,” that department head would not be in great shape for the rest of the day.

In the workplace, women are much more likely than men to concentrate on the process and the relationships involved, rather than on the profit line at the end of the quarter or the end of the year. It’s women you’ll hear say they wouldn’t want to work in the Screw ’em company because that company sucks the blood out of its people and doesn’t care whether they’re happy or miserable as long as the share value is maintained.

As a result, whenever Michael O’Leary gets himself a raft of nearly-free publicity, like when he offended Sarkozy and the Madame by incorporating them into one of his ads, it’s men who snigger and admire his “fighting spirit” and “focus on the bottom line” while women are less impressed by O’Leary’s macho meanness. Being told to bring their own pens to work and concentrate their every waking moment on Ryanair’s profits is not something most women instinctively warm to.

Yet the whole scenario reverses when sport is the issue. Process is all that matters. The trophy can go down the tubes as long as the lads — in David Coleman’s great phrase — open their legs and show their class.

Sport and dishwashers are the great separators of the sexes. For years, I thought it was just the man in my life who was obsessional about the dishwasher. Then I discovered that he is just one of many males who regard a cup gone into the dishwasher as a cup thereby endangered. Men are convinced that cups, saucers and plates feel better if washed and dried by hand. Or even just washed — they’re happy enough to leave them on the draining board to dry in streaks. They’re convinced if you put an egg cup in a dishwasher, it’ll get bullied by a soup bowl or harassed by a dinner plate. They get worried, deep in their water, by the knives sitting so erect with the forks, tines ready to impale. They just don’t like the entire thing.

Men seem to assume a dishwasher is an extension of a woman. Herself really should be doing the dishes, so she rigged it that a machine does it instead. But it’s very definitely HER machine, and a decent man wouldn’t lower himself to get involved with it, never mind take pleasure in it. I have yet to meet a man who gets a kick out of a neatly stacked dishwasher. If you fight them to a standstill and negotiate an agreement that they’ll put stuff into the machine, they subvert the agreement by placing the items in a bomb-struck pattern where cast-iron saucepans menace the integrity of fragile wine glasses, where food scraping is ignored so the innards of the technology get indigestion from rubbery mushrooms and where small plastic items are situated to do a dive through the bottom onto the element, where they can burn and melt and fill the kitchen with sodden smoke.

The only time men will engage with a dishwasher is if it offers a perverse diversion. Some celeb chef maintains you can cook a salmon in foil on the top rack of a dishwasher. Tell a woman that and you get an impatient shrug: why would anybody want to? Tell a man and he gets fascinated by the prospect.

Some men cloak their dishwasher hatred in spurious environmental concern. These are the guys who use a Niagara Falls-worth of flowing water when they brush their teeth, but they worry about the energy and water used to clean a few dishes. They feel close to nature — or at least to their mothers — when they face a sink full of hot sudsy water with a tea towel thrown over their shoulder, accessorising their brief domesticity with a little sang froid. Point out that the sink utilises four times the water the dishwasher does and they sulk.

Even emptying the bloody thing is a challenge to them. You know the read-the-instructions block most men have? It comes from the same string of DNA from which they get the read-the-map block. Even with IKEA furniture, the average man would rather make up the item first and read the instructions later, even if it means he’s left with a worrying handful of essential items IKEA never labelled as spares. Similarly, a man who lowers himself to empty the dishwasher doesn’t pay attention to the advice not to pull out the two full drawers simultaneously. Fending off a heavy machine that’s lost its sense of balance and lurches forward is manly, you see. Plus picking up the broken glass usually results in a disabling cut preventing further dishwasher excursions for several weeks.

Lest you should imagine this is a sexist rant (which it is), I point you to data recently presented to me which suggests the dishwasher is one of those apparently small final points of disagreement putting paid to many relationships. One couple who recently broke up split because she bought a second dishwasher, in the belief that one could serve to hold clean dishes and the other would be filled with dirty crockery. It was a dishwasher too far for her mate, who left her over it.

The man who produced this data for me says that his own long happy marriage has been marred, not by a dishwasher, but by tea towels. His wife hangs two kinds of tea towel on the AGA. He thinks one is for the inside of saucepans and one for the outside, but he’s not sure and he’s afraid to ask.

Remember Albert: it’s not the big things that destroy, but the little things. And that applies to more than politics.