As I arrive home these days, my heart starts to beat a little faster. After 15 years of marriage, my husband can still bring a flush of excitement to my cheeks and a girlish smile to my lips.

But it’s not the prospect of a massage with scented oils that gets my pulse  racing, or the long, lingering kisses he surprises me with. 

It’s the glorious sight of the bins neatly placed outside the front door, the prospect of crisply-ironed sheets in the laundry room, and the delicious smell of a home-cooked meal in the kitchen.

My husband has become a domestic god — and, to me, that’s pure romance.

Last week, a report revealed couples who divide the domestic chores score higher on marital satisfaction and are more likely to stay together than those who don’t.

How? Well, a year ago, fed up with Max’s chronic untidiness and refusal to help in the house, I went on strike for a week. Now I am convinced it is the best thing I ever did. It most certainly saved our marriage.

Our relationship had become toxic. Max is a photographer, mostly working at night. I have a stressful job as a newspaper executive. Yet the responsibility for caring for our children, Zac, age 14, and  ten-year-old Mimi, plus the shopping, cooking and cleaning, had been dumped firmly on my shoulders.

A typical day? After a ten-hour shift at work in London, I’d commute for two hours back to our house in West Sussex. I’d return exhausted, only to find piles of dirty laundry, two hungry, dirty children, and Max sitting in front of the computer surrounded by discarded Twix wrappers — his evening meal of choice.

I never liked to cause a scene in front of the children, so would inwardly seethe as I supervised bedtime, cooked and tidied up. 

It wasn’t unusual for me to still be wearing my coat as I ironed school shirts and stacked the dishwasher at 10.30 pm — I was so busy I’d forget to take it off on my return.

Hardly surprising, then, that at bedtime, I was rarely in the mood for sex. Max and I would exchange a few barbed comments — he assuming I was ‘in a strop about something’ and not daring to venture further — and we’d climb glumly into bed, before sleeping back-to-back without touching. 

This could go on for weeks  and weeks. And it made me sad, comparing this to the exciting early days of our marriage. 

Although I never seriously considered leaving Max, I’d reconciled myself to an existence where we shared a house and surname but little else.

He wasn’t happy either, and was puzzled by my lack of interest in our love life and fed up with my constant nagging. 

 

 

The final straw for me came one night exactly a year ago, when I returned home late after a difficult day to find the children watching TV and eating takeaways on the sofa, the house in complete chaos, no milk in the fridge and nothing for me to eat unless I cooked it for myself. 

Close to tears, I rang my elder sister. She told me things could not continue like this for the sake of my mental and physical health, not to mention the example I was setting the children. 

Was it right for Zac or Mimi to see their mother as little more than a skivvy — and an unhappy one?
So I devised a plan. For one week, I would leave Max in charge of all things domestic and shut my eyes to the resulting mess. 

I was hoping the shock tactic would force him into action. 

That he would not only appreciate the sheer amount of work it took to run our house, but also see the truth of why I was left feeling so tired and unsexy every evening. 

It worked brilliantly. The house rapidly descended into chaos, with the sink piled high with sticky plates, the children searching for lost PE kits and curtains staying drawn for days. The stress and discomfort worked where nagging had singularly failed. 

The penny finally dropped for Max, especially when I wrote about my feelings about the situation at home in this newspaper.

Shocked and hurt, he asked: ‘What can I do?’ 

I replied: ‘For a start, you can stop asking me what to do. Take responsibility for our home.’

The next morning, Max leapt out of bed and brought me up a cup of coffee, before making a lovely cooked breakfast. He walked Mimi to school and tidied the kitchen. 

And that evening the house was tidy, he’d put a wash on, and had even managed to make a risotto instead of buying a pizza. 

But, best of all, the bins had been put out for collection. Suddenly, instead of feeling like a taken-for-granted domestic slave, I felt pampered and cosseted. 

 

No wonder the grateful kiss I gave him turned into something a bit more enthusiastic. All the same, I was sceptical this was anything more than a one-day wonder. Max, after all, is an Italian mamma’s boy and was brought up in a wealthy, aristocratic family where staff did the housework.

It had simply never occurred to him he would be expected to pitch in after we married. As far as he was concerned, it was enough that he pulled in a salary. The fact that I brought home the bacon, too, didn’t seem to count. 

However, I had been raised very differently. My father was a new man before the term was even invented. Despite working two jobs, he would always get up in the night to change a nappy, and brought my mother breakfast in bed. 

No wonder, with such different domestic expectations, Max and I had started to clash.
I waited with dread for the moment when he would stop making an effort and we’d slide back into our unhappy groove.

But, a year on, that moment has never come. Now, instead of feeling angry and exploited, I am comforted by the feeling that Max and I work as a team. 

I have learned to temper my perfectionism. I still colour-code my underwear but no longer force my standards onto others. 

He recently came home with a carpet cleaner and got to work. ‘Just look at the dirt I’ve got out of this carpet,’ he said proudly afterwards.

At last Max was taking pride in our home, and this has had a huge impact on the whole family. 

The children see we’re all responsible for the house, not just me, so they have started helping too. Mimi can tackle a whole basket of ironing. Zac packs his school bag and, last weekend, made bacon sandwiches for everyone and loaded the dishwasher afterwards. 

But the best thing of all about sharing the domestic load? Our love life has never been better.

For one thing, I find Max even more attractive, as he’s physically fitter. In the old days, he would lounge about, smoking and eating chocolate, but since doing the housework, he’s lost a stone. 
We no longer need a gardener and eat fewer takeaways. What we save is spent on date nights instead.

This Christmas, Max bought me jewellery for the first time. And he took me away to a hotel for Valentine’s Day.

Also, because he now appreciates everything I do for the family, my nagging is a thing of the past 

So here’s my advice to all you husbands out there: if you want your wife to make more of an effort in the bedroom, start by putting some effort yourself into the rest of the house. 

The results may make you the happiest man ever.