YOU can be happy as larry and utterly in love and still find your partner annoys the hell out of you.

This is the reality The Fiance and I are coming to terms now we’re fast approaching our fourth anniversary.

Gone are the days when he would tidy up before I came home or ring me at work ‘just cos I wanted to hear your voice, snugglebunny!’

Now we bicker lovingly over who’s hogging more of the duvet or the fact I can see more socks on the bedroom floor than carpet.

I think this is why people say a successful relationship requires patience.

I can tell you now: they’re not wrong.

I’ve used bucketloads of the stuff - and that’s just to get me through the endless Formula One races that The Fiance thinks are interesting.

He’s wrong, obviously, but he won’t have it.

And then there’s Formula One qualifying. And Formula One ‘free practice’. And don’t get me started on the snooker, football, rugby, cricket...

But apparently I’m no saint myself.

“Oh my god,” he says in his best ‘long-suffering’ voice, as he surveys the pile of women’s magazines littered around me on the sofa.

“How many times do you need to read the same gossip? Does anyone even care whether Khloe Kardashian has a bikini body? And what kind of a name is ‘Khloe’ anyway??”

He pauses then adds: “By the way, you didn’t rinse your Weetabix bowl this morning. It’s minging when you leave it to go crusty.”

But romance isn’t completely dead - and in the last two weeks he’s bought me flowers, sat through several trashy American dramas and tonight we’re going on a date.

This, he says, is on the condition that I stop leaving almost-empty shampoo bottles around the edge of the bath.

Of course I won’t, because there’s a system that he just doesn’t understand.

And there’s no point in us both being wrong is there?