Think of any long-standing male/female couple you know, and ask yourself which partner has the greater tendency to boss the other around. If my hunch is correct, in at least eight out of ten cases the answer you’ll come up with is the woman.

True, I can’t speak for other cultures in which women have been traditionally assigned more submissive roles — although I suspect that even in many of these, wives and mothers tend to rule the roost at home.

But certainly it’s been my experience of 38 years of marriage (and counting) that I’ve been much more a taker than a giver of orders — and the same seems to go for almost all my married male friends.

So, with this near-universal truth in mind, at first I thought campaigners had a good point when they asked this week why men make up the overwhelming majority of those prosecuted for the offence, created by Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, of ‘controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship’.

It’s been my experience of 38 years of marriage (and counting) that I’ve been much more a taker than a giver of orders, writes Tom Utley

Stigma

Indeed, a Freedom of Information request submitted by ManKind Initiative, a helpline for male victims of domestic abuse, finds there were only four women among the 272 people charged with the offence between December 2015 and March last year.

How could this be so, when we all know that, in most relationships, women are by nature more controlling than men — or at least more insistent on getting their way?

The helpline spokesman, Mark Brooks, suggests the answer may lie in police and prosecutors’ ‘unconscious bias’, which makes them more inclined to believe female than male victims of psychological abuse.

‘As we know,’ he says, ‘the perpetrators of controlling and coercive behaviour are incredibly manipulative individuals and they almost always make a counter-allegation.’

I daresay there may be something in this. I’m also sure that Deputy Chief Constable Louisa Rolfe, of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, is right when she says male victims are less likely than females to call the police.

After all, even in these enlightened times, when we’re supposed to swallow the fiction that there are no fundamental differences between the sexes, it is still widely thought wimpish of a man to complain about being bullied by a woman, while much less stigma attaches to women who complain about men.

Yet the more I’ve thought about this, the more I’m convinced that Ms Rolfe is wrong when she says females are ‘equally’ capable of offending under the 2015 Act. Not for one moment do I dispute that women can behave abominably towards their menfolk. Take Jordan Worth, 22, who in April became the first of her sex to be convicted of the new offence.

As a court heard, she brutally assaulted her partner, Alex Skeel, also 22, battering and stabbing him, pouring scalding water over his arms and starving him to within days of death. She broke all his mobile phones, isolated him from his family and dictated every aspect of his life, telling him what clothes he should wear and the people he could speak to.

But in the extreme viciousness of her coercive behaviour, she was surely highly unusual among women.

Generally, men are physically stronger and more violent by nature — their threats more intimidating — and when a contemptible minority of my sex take it into their heads to bully their partners, they tend to be far more terrifying, and the effects on their victims more devastating.

I am therefore not in the least surprised that men far outnumber women among those prosecuted for controlling and coercive behaviour, as for all other offences against the person.

Meekly

But my central point surely holds true: show me the relationship in which the man bosses the woman around — telling her what colour curtains she should buy or where she should leave her muddy boots — and I’ll show you an exception to the general rule.

Far more often, it’s the woman who lays down the law, and the man who meekly obeys. Moreover, this appears to have been true since the dawn of time, when Eve ill-advisedly ate the forbidden fruit and instructed Adam to do the same.

Look at English literature and popular culture through the ages — strewn with the henpecking wives of downtrodden husbands, from Lady Macbeth to Horace Rumpole’s She Who Must Be Obeyed and Arthur Daley’s ’Er Indoors.

If the comic (and sometimes tragic) stereotype were not laden with truth to this day, then it would have stopped resonating with audiences centuries ago. Indeed, in a straw poll I conducted among colleagues and drinking companions at the pub, one friend told me his wife always chooses his shirt and tie combination for the day, while even his ten-year-old daughter is forever barking orders at him. (‘Stop at Tesco, Daddy! I want an ice cream!’)

Another, also male, tells me his wife insists that he brings her a cup of tea in bed every morning, because her father always did the same for her mother. Often, she leaves it undrunk.

Meanwhile, a female friend says she won’t let her man anywhere near the dishwasher (what is it about women and their mysterious stacking rules, which seem to defy all reason?). Another admits to giving her burly builder husband a shopping list every Saturday — and sending him back to the supermarket with a flea in his ear if he returns with the wrong brand of butter.

Wisdom

In my case, I obediently comply when Mrs U issues me instructions on who to ask for dinner, or decides we must get rid of my precious downstairs loo in order to realise her dreams of expanding the kitchen. Nor can I help noticing that whenever one of our sons wants to borrow the car (my car, bought, taxed and insured by me), he always asks Mum, and not Dad. But then he knows who’s boss.

All this I take with a philosophical shrug. Like so many husbands, I comfort myself that at least I’m allowed to decide on the really important questions: does God exist? (Yes); is unilateral nuclear disarmament a good idea? (I waver, but on balance I think it would be unwise); should Stokes be allowed straight back into the England XI after his acquittal on charges of affray? (No).

Meanwhile, Mrs U looks after the little things: where we should live; what we should eat; which friends we should cultivate and which we should drop; where we should go on our holidays . . . The list could go on for ever.

Why do so many of us put up with it? I guess that a part of the explanation is that women tend to care more than men about the state of the home and what’s good for the family.

But the main reason, I reckon, is that most of us have come to appreciate the wisdom of that time-honoured advice: ‘Happy wife, happy life.’ As a sage colleague puts it: ‘When a man enters a marriage and wants it to last, he voluntarily contracts out his free will to his wife.’

But let me end with the immortal words attributed to the late Sir Denis Thatcher, husband of the great Margaret, when someone asked him who wore the trousers in the Thatcher household.

‘I do,’ he is said to have replied. ‘And I wash and iron them, too!’

I reckon a good eight out of ten of us husbands know exactly how he felt.