That's men for you:Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health
Will you be there for me when things go right? is the wonderful title of a research report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which contains a valuable clue as to how to keep the female in your life ticking over happily.
Generally speaking, we guys are willing enough to show concern when things go wrong for our partners. But when things happen that make her happy or give her a boost we are not so quick, perhaps, to jump in with expressions of delight.
This is where we're getting it wrong. Researchers at the University of California - which is where you would expect this sort of research to be done - put couples into a laboratory and filmed them talking to one another. They were asked to talk about positive and negative events that had happened to them.
What the researchers were after was to assess the degree of support which each member of the couple gave the other when being told good news.
When they checked back with the couples some months later, they found that the ones who were broken up earliest were those in which one of the partners showed little interest in the other's good news.
This, in turn, seems to suggest that if you want your relationship to flourish, you would be very wise to indulge in a bit of ooohing and aaahing when herself recites her triumphs, major and minor.
And everybody has their triumphs. It could be a promotion, making a sale, besting a colleague at work, getting a refund for that bottle of wine that tasted like a mouse died in it, rescuing the clothes off the line just before it rains, beating the traffic by finding a shortcut - the list really is endless.
Some of those triumphs may seem to merit no more than a shrug. But what the research suggests is that if we are willing to share in our partner's good fortune, even in trivial matters, then our relationship will be strengthened. And if we are unresponsive, we may pay for it sooner than we think.
And, guys, here is why this could really pay off: when females get into an animated, supportive, conversation they get a surge of oxytocin, a hormone involved in affection and intimacy.
It's to do with the way their brains develop in the womb. They basically get a kick out of conversation that the male of the species just does not get. That, in turn, is to do with the way the male brain develops in the womb. (You can read more about this in a new book called The Female Brain by Dr Louann Brizendine who directs the Women's Mood & Hormone Clinic at the, yes, University of California.)
What this means is that if you get into a supportive conversation about your mate's little and big triumphs, you are not only engaging in a relationship-building exercise but you are also giving her a nice little chemical surge of oxytocin. You are The Man, yes.
So now you know where that old concept of "chatting her up" came from and why it works often enough for us hunter-gatherers to go on doing it.
But men like to be praised too, ladies. Some enthusiastic recognition of our triumphs over colleagues, commuters, tough customers, etc will get you a long, long way. And if we pretend we don't care, just don't believe us. Some wise person once said words to the effect that "he who turns away praise is seeking to be praised twice".
In a psychological theory called transactional analysis, this sort of thing is called "stroking", which has nothing to do with Fianna Fáil. It refers to all those opportunities you have to acknowledge somebody else and have them acknowledge you. A little praise, even a smile, a wave or a nod can provide some much-needed stroking and help people to feel good.
So try it out over Christmas and see what happens. Do a little stroking and wait for her to purr.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.