It is very easy in the hurly-burly of modern life and the complex sparring of a day-to-day relationship to forget that we are dealing with a real live human being here and not just someone we bounce off as we go along. It is easy to start to take someone for granted, to think we’ve thanked them or praised them or said ‘please’, when instead we ignored them, were rude by the guilty sin of omission, disregarded them and generally behaved like they were pond life by default.

To make the relationship go with a zing, you have to go back to square one and start being courteous again in the old-fashioned sense of the word. You have to reintroduce yourselves to each other as respectful, tactful individuals who are going to start again being pleasant, kind, civil and polite. From now on you will say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ no matter how many times a day it is necessary. Be thoughtful. Be complimentary. Give gifts without there being any reason for doing so. Ask questions to show you are interested in what your partner is saying.

Be solicitous of their health, welfare, dreams, hopes, workload, interests and pleasure. Take time to help them. Take time to focus on their needs and wants. Take time to just be there for them – just to listen, show an interest, show that you still love them. Don’t allow benign neglect to ruin your relationship.

We treat strangers exceedingly well and usually reserve our best attentions for people we work with. Our partner gets missed, lost in the bustle of it all. In fact we should treat them better than anyone else. After all, they are supposed to be the most important person in the world to us. It makes sense to show them this is true.

Of course, if you already do all this you must excuse me reminding you to.

I was reading about a chap who kept buying his wife new handbags – always unsuitable ones, not big enough or tough enough for her needs. She tried explaining that she was quite happy to buy her own bags as she was a grown-up, but he had got it into his head that his idea of ‘style’ was so much better than hers. In the end she bought him a bag and that shut him up for a bit. I thought this a wonderfully Zen solution. She didn’t get cross or yell at him, but just gently poked fun at him. Brilliant.