As the dank Bank Holiday wore on, with more or less harmony among the nation’s couples, an enterprising publisher announced the reissue of two 1913 volumes of “humorous” advice for husbands and wives: Blanche Ebbutt’s Don’ts for Husbands and Don’ts for Wives.

Well, there always was a market for self-help books about marriage. I fondly remember Jilly Cooper in the 1970s advising young wives to choose a job that gets them home before the husband, so that they can finish the housework and look pretty when he gets in because men do hate women fussing around with dusters. Equally, Marabel Morgan in the Eighties defied feminism (and common prudence) by urging us to meet our man at the door in frilly negligées and phone the poor devil at work murmuring “I crave your body”. Today there are enough tomes about men being from Mars and weird rules of dating to fill a dozen wheelie bins. Whereas everyone knows, deep down, that the only real rule is that these writings say more about opportunist publishers than deep human nature. So it is expected that Blanche Ebbutt’s oeuvre will provide more comedy value than useful advice.

And yet, and yet . . . glancing at the excerpts, there are eternal verities there. 1913 man is advised not to “scoff” if the wife wants to drive the car; 1913 woman not to flirt with other men because it is “like playing with tigers and volcanoes”. He is told not to talk down to his wife because “she has as much intelligence as your colleague at the office”, to share jokes with her as well as with his mates, and not to leave pencil sharpenings on the floor or denigrate her taste in fiction. She is adjured not to look down on a man for physical imperfection, to greet him nicely when he arrives home, and to compliment him if he looks nice or does well with the garden. There are plenty of gloriously retro bits about women censoring their men’s socks and husbands learning to “lead” rather than “drive” their wives; but who could argue when Ebbutt says that there is an art in being married, and that you should not “exhaust your artistic power in getting married” but put some effort into staying that way.

This view has faded a little in the age of modern companionate marriage and rising female expectations. It sometimes seems, reading and observing, as if the notion of deploying effort, cleverness, and determined goodwill inside marriage (or prolonged partnership) has atrophied as women got more confident and physical sexuality took centre stage. In advice, fiction and TV there is polarisation between those who advocate frilly, vampish absurdities to “keep passion alive” and those who think that equality means perpetual competition, and a tedious sexual politics that jealously counts who does every household chore and celebrates women who bitch about the deficiencies of the male. I lose count of the chick-lit novels celebrating the shallowest aspects of female nature – shoe addiction, silliness, shopaholic Gaye Gambol profligacy – while excoriating men for being irrational about football, or cars, or reluctance to “commit” (frankly, until the prenup becomes law I would be nervous of committing my lifetime’s earning power to a lot of the self-obsessed fictional airheads we women are supposed to love).

Even older-women’s fiction – and journalism – often wilfully ignores the emotional rights of the male. One new novel is about a woman so neurotic about being 50 – for God’s sake! – that she is vile to her long-suffering husband, splashes out on flash underwear, sleeps with a stranger and pays scant attention to her offspring. And we are supposed to identify with the silly cow! Other frequent discourse tackles the “problem” of a man retired or redundant, suddenly being at home all day under his wife’s feet in “her” domain. Never mind that he paid for most of the damn house, sweating in a boring office and commuting for 30 years. Never mind keeping passion alive; how about keeping simple friendliness alive?

The new commonplace of the higher-earning woman also needs a bit of work. Men need to learn that it is childish to flounce around claiming to be emasculated by earning less, and then run off with some woman lower down the earning chain just in order to be worshipped again. But women, frankly, often need lessons in being graceful and tactful about being main breadwinners. They are not always so. I am still haunted by a letter in The Guardian some years ago from a woman who was supporting her redundant husband while he wrote a book, and said that she felt aggrieved and didn’t like him expressing opinions at dinner parties because her earnings had paid for the newspapers that enabled him to have the opinions in the first place. I am sorry to say that the reply to this was not “Curl up in shame, you unloving materialist bitch!”, which would probably have been my approach. This may be why I am not an agony aunt.

It all comes down to marital courtesy, to kindness; now more than ever as lines between the sexes blur. We are nearly all co-educated now, or have worked with the opposite sex; there is no excuse for not having a reasonable working knowledge of the differences and sensitivities. What is required, first and foremost, as Ebbutt hints from the grave, is simple niceness: be as considerate towards a life partner as towards a friend. And expect them to be pleasant back. All the complicated, passionate, sexual-political stuff matters too, but unless it stands on a foundation of civilised gentleness it has little chance.

So, go on: clear up those pencil sharpenings, chaps. And women, tell Him Indoors that his hair looks nice. Can’t hurt, can it?

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