When I was a teenager I had this friend, and he had the sex business taped. He never failed; shagged everything. You know how the toast always falls butter side down? Well, girls always fell on their backs for him. I had a girlfriend, and when I mentioned this mate and his astonishing success to her, she laughed and said: “Well, you know, the thing about him is that he hates women.”

Hates women? How can you say he hates women? He does nothing but lurve them, and they’re apparently forming disorderly queues to be lurved. He’s hardly gay – how can you say he hates women? She did that sighing “Do I really have to explain this to you?” business that women do and replied: “Of course he’s not gay, gay men love women. It’s obvious he hates us; that’s why he has to bed so many.”

But I hate horses and I don’t have to ride a new one every Friday and Saturday. “No, you’re frightened of horses, that’s not the same thing – and you’re frightened of women.” I’m not. She smiled and that was pretty much the end of that.

I only mention this because it was the first of many, many arguments with many, many women in which I was apparently wrong but for no apparent reason. And although I’ve continued to engage in meaningful emotional discussions with those of the opposite sex, I never seem to learn that I will always be in the wrong. Wrong because of some sort of girl blindness. Wrong because I haven’t noticed something that’s staring, and occasionally slapping, me in the face. A later girlfriend told me on the way out of the door that “ignorance of the female is no excuse”.

I could no more draw you a map to what women want than a woman could read it.

On the face of it, of course, women want the same things men want. Equal pay, equal rights, equal protection, equal opportunity, equal respect, equal shares of your income and all the house. Women want to be hugged in the night, smiled at for no reason, surprised in a predictable way, and have the lid put back on the honey – but then those are all things I want as well.

I’ve learnt that women want to be offered things that they don’t really want. They don’t want to tell jokes, as a rule – they don’t particularly like jokes – but they do want you to make them laugh. It’s not the laugh they care about, it’s the fact that you’re making exhaustive efforts to make them laugh. Women like to flirt, but don’t much care for men who flirt. They want protection, but not paternalism. So don’t run round and open the car door, but do open the door to the XXX the bag if it is full of vegetables, but not if it’s full of shoes.

And I’ve realised that when men argue, we keep things personal and singular. Women, on the other hand, escalate to third-party collective after the first shot. They become symbolic representatives for the whole gender. So a man will say, “You don’t know what I want,” but a woman will say: “You don’t know what women want.” There’s a difference. That’s all of them against just you. Don’t think you can turn round and say, “Well, you don’t know what men want,” because it’s as plain as the lump in your Y-fronts what men want, and every woman knows it.

It was another girlfriend who said: “You have no idea what women want.” Naturally, I replied: “Well, why don’t you tell me, then?” Leaving myself open for the checkmate riposte (note the “we” here) – “We want a man who knows what we want without having to be asked.” And that’s the best I can do in answering the question “What makes women happy?” If you have to ask, you’re not even close to knowing.