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“It has to be all about you, doesn’t it?” In my extensive experience it’s almost impossible to respond to such a challenge without making your answer All About You.
    6.
The Wrongness of Offering an Ultimatum.
Whoops! Did you just draw a line in the sand? I think we both know you didn’t mean to do that. When has brinkmanship ever worked for you in the past? My wife never blinks in these matters: she knows I’m going all in with the argumentative equivalent of a pair of fours.
    7.
The Wrongness of Being a Bit of a Cock.
All you have to say in this case is, “Perhaps I’m being a bit of a cock about this,but . . .” You might get a denial in return, although you shouldn’t hold your breath.
    Now all you have to do is find a way to acknowledge your error and give up. This is not a simple matter of saying, “Hang on a minute—I think I’m wrong!” and flicking on the TV. If you’re going to be wrong, you’ve got to look wrong, even if that means mimicking a last-ditch attempt to save face.
    Use whatever technique works best for you. Say “huh” dismissively and then let an awkward silence bloom. Or fold your arms, sit down, and stare at your shoes for a full minute—a classic. Try conceding in a way that doesn’t sound at all conciliatory, by saying something such as “I’m wrestling with the unattractive possibility that you may have a point.”
    Here’s one I use a lot, even now: I just say, “Whatever.”
    â€œWhatever” has a reputation as a meaningless piece of conversational shorthand, but it’s actually terribly useful when conceding an argument. It acknowledges someone’s right to an opinion without necessarily giving it credence, and, depending on your inflection, it can also imply that while life is too important to waste time fighting, your willingness to make peace—to be the bigger person—comes at some emotional cost. Best of all, it does all this gracelessly. The other person will assume that having lost your case on points, you are seeking to abandon the discussion before a humiliating climbdown becomes necessary. With “whatever,” everybody walks away with something.
    One of the great tactical advantages of admitting you’re wrong is that in marriage nobody wants to be a bad winner. If you love someone it’s impossible to draw much pleasure fromforcing them to admit a mistake. The very few times I’ve actually won an argument I’ve noticed a strange hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach which somehow robs the moment of all satisfaction. And that is not how I want to feel at the end of an argument. That’s how I want my wife tofeel.

5.
    Am I Relevant?
    M en, you may have heard, are fast becoming outmoded. Permanent shifts in the economy and our social structures have created new employment opportunities and lifestyle options for women, rendering the human male obsolete. The market doesn’t need us and, more significantly, women don’t need us either. As far as women are concerned, men are useless. And a husband, from a woman’s point of view, is just a useless man on a long lease. Who will want to marry you, now the End of Men is nigh? What can men do, at this stage of the game, to make themselves indispensable to society, and to womankind?
    The problem, it seems, is that men’s traditional cultural capital—breadwinning, repressing emotions, etc.—no longer has much trade-in value. Women have colonized the workplace without ceding any domestic territory. Men have been slow to adapt to the new dispensation. Our most valuable resource—sperm—is both less potent than it used to be and more widely available than ever. I think you can get sperm from Amazon. Now that the bottom has dropped out of the sperm market, men must diversify while they still have options. Nobody wants to get caught with a load of worthless sperm