Whatever you say, honey

Unlike many relationship gurus, Laura Doyle boasts no qualifications. She is simply a housewife who, having discovered the way to keep her man happy, has decided to spread the good news in a book provocatively entitled The Surrendered Wife. By the time she was four years into her marriage, Laura Doyle was, by her own admission, a controlling shrew. The Surrendered Wife charts not only her own transformation but offers readers a step-by-step guide on how they too can achieve "true intimacy".

We meet at the BBC in London in the middle of a hectic publicity schedule for the Doyles. Laura is a chunky, homely-looking 34; John is tall, blue-eyed and a bit of a gentle giant. The couple - who naturally live in California - first published The Surrendered Wife (yes, this was a joint effort) by using John's know-how on the Internet at the tail-end of 1999.

It immediately raised hackles among the west coast sisterhood. Laura Doyle, they ranted, was a dinosaur, taking women back to the Dark Ages. The psychotherapy industry was equally dismissive. "Personally offensive and scientifically unfounded" was marital psychologist John Gottman's verdict.

Yet while feminists gnash their teeth, women in their droves are following Laura Doyle down the primrose path of surrender: handing over their pay-cheques to hubby, making themselves available for sex at least once a week, and generally coping with every volatile situation with those classic words: "Whatever you say, honey." The Surrendered Wife has already sold 150,000 copies in the US since it was taken up by Simon & Schuster in January.

The problem for a non-American reader is that it is laughably naive. Take Laura Doyle's ideas on how a foundering sex life can be jump-started into passion.

"Step 1 [of seven]: Squeeze his arm and say, `Ooh, you're strong'. Step 2: Put on a negligee and lay on the bed with a book. Step 3: Tell him he looks sexy in those jeans and squeeze his butt," she writes.

In the section "What a Piece of Work Is Man", the reader (a wife, naturally) is advised: "If you think about how admiring - instead of trying to alter - God's creations (like your husband) makes you feel a divine presence, then you can begin to see how surrendering can make you feel closer to God".

Yet Doyle is not the product of the fundamentalist bible belt. Her maiden name was Mills and she is of Scottish descent. She and her husband describe themselves as "middle-class lefties" and are suitably mocking about George W. Bush ("He's just silly, terrifyingly silly; just for the record, we didn't vote for him.") But then, as John Doyle explains, he is "completely Irish" on both sides of his family - Co Cork and Co Clare. John believes it was his Irish Catholicism - his wish to keep the marriage intact come what may - that led to him becoming a doormat.

"Although I started to resent being micro-managed through all my whole life, I'm basically a get-along kinda guy, not wanting to make waves," he says. There is a touching togetherness about the couple. When her husband is talking, Laura looks at him admiringly, nodding and saying: "Right, right." But in the early days, nothing John Doyle did was right - from loading the dishwasher to driving the car. Rather than retaliate, he retreated into his shell - until one day he just lost it. They were, in a surreal twist, on a visit to Disneyland. "I said: `Why didn't you get me that for my anniversary, instead of getting me this? It would have cost less, but I would have liked it more,' " Laura remembers, her eyes meeting John's for confirmation. "I mean, it was appalling. I'm not proud of it, but I have to say that's how it was."

There was no Damascene conversation, no moment when "the surrendered lightbulb went on in my head", just a slow dawning via a marriage counsellor that because she couldn't change her husband, she would have to change herself. Much of Laura Doyle's approach is simply good sense. The UK edition of the book is endorsed by Fay Weldon, no less, with the quote: "Forget the rights and wrongs, it works. It's a miracle." The wrongs are presumably the way in which the book has been packaged, as well as the fact that it appears to advocate a total retreat from the hard-fought battles of the last 40 years. But her critics have misunderstood her, Doyle insists. "What I'm saying is, you take the focus off of someone else - the idea that if I could change you I would be happy - and I take all that energy and bring it back to myself. What am I feeling, what are my desires, what is it I want to be doing? It's not about subservience, it's not about submission. Submission has the root word `sub' in it, which means below, which implies that one of you is superior and one of you is inferior. And that's not what I mean," she says. But what about the meaning of surrender? Surely the implication there is of a winner and a loser? "That's one definition, but that's not the way I'm using it," she says. "Surrender is something we all have to do. You surrender to traffic jams because you can't make the cars move. You can either spend the time honking and yelling at other drivers or you can spend the time listening to a book on tape."

Wouldn't acceptance be a better term? `It's beyond acceptance because it's not just that I accept that I'm in this traffic jam. I'm embracing it, I'm at one with the traffic jam, if you will. Or I'm at one with the universe and the traffic jam is part of the universe," Doyle says.

THE curious thing about Laura Doyle's "surrender" is how, ultimately, it's just as controlling as its opposite. Take finances. Although she advocates handing everything over to the husband, he should then hand her back a monthly "self-care" allowance in cash, the amount to be decided by her. Because, as Doyle insists, women can't turn the clock back on what the last 40 years have taught us. "A big part of what we have now is self-awareness, and that's a very critical piece of surrendering," she says. "It's not just that I'm accepting him the way he is, I'm taking that energy and putting it where it belongs: back into my own self-care, my own pleasure. I'm taking responsibility for my own happiness, you see." So what should a wife say or do when her husband behaves in a way that goes beyond mere irritation, like always leaving the toilet seat up?

"You just have to say: `I really want the toilet seat down. That's what I want and how I feel.' That's perfectly within the realm of things that you would say," she advises.

What if he takes no notice?

"Then you have a choice. You can say to yourself: `Well, here's a guy I love. I can either start bickering about the toilet seat or I can put it down myself.' "It's a matter of perspective. I can look at my husband as a glass that's half-full or a glass that's half-empty. If I'm focused on the toilet seat being up, then he's a glass that's half-empty. If I'm focused on that he works hard to support the family and will bring me a glass of water in the middle of the night, and makes me laugh and does the dishes, then he's a glass that's half-full," she says.

She looks at her husband. "Right?" "Right," John says.

The Surrendered Wife is published by Simon & Schuster, £10 in the UK