Tip One -All the Precedents Men

There follows an excellent tip for all you cohabitee chaps in your never ending time and space territory wars. It is worthwhile remembering that when for instance you pop out to get a takeaway for dinner on a Saturday night, if you are making a first visit to this particular curry house or whatever, perhaps you are new to the area or something, you are Setting a Precedent.

If you want to rush down there, stand drumming your fingers on the counter while they prepare your meal to ensure your tikka masala is speedily knocked together, fine. Then it will been registered and forever stored away in the missus' mind that this trip takes no more than half an hour. My advice however would be to place your order, ask for an ETA, saunter across the road to the pub, enjoy a couple of pints and 20-30 minutes interface with the barmaid, and then pick up your meal and back home.

Now, you see, you have established a say, up to an hour or so timeframe for this activity forever and you have bought yourself some well deserved R&R for the forthcoming years that would otherwise have at best raised a cold eyebrow, at worst been stored away and added to The List (the overdraft of percieved moral debt that you have no doubt already accumulated which with most men, if it were a monetary thing, after about the two year mark of cohabitude would have probably exceeded the negative balance of your mortgage and after the five year mark would be rivaling the third worlds debt to the international bank).

And the beauty of all this is of course, that once you have mastered this principle with the take away thing, you can start applying it to other areas of married life and watch your pub time and overall quality of life accumulate.