That's men for you - Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health: I sent off for a book once which was supposed to contain the secrets of happiness.
Needless to say it didn't work. It did, however, have one thing to say which you don't often hear and which still strikes me as true. This was that men are the romantics in life and women are the hard-headed pragmatists.
We are usually told the opposite. The man in the old ad scaled the walls in his turtleneck pullover to bring a box of Milk Tray to the lady not because he was romantic but because she was. And a whole industry is based on the notion that women must have flowers bought for them because they are romantic.
But is that really the case? Is the true romantic not the one who actually buys the flowers and the chocolates and who books the candlelit dinner?
The romantic idea of arranging the horse and carriage to bring the daughter to her First Communion is usually, I have little doubt, the man's - and an idea by the way which he would do better not to have in the first place.
And you know those little remote-controlled racing cars? I was out in UCD one Saturday afternoon during one otherwise long-forgotten summer when I came across an actual rally consisting of men racing these little cars. They were dressed up in all the gear and some of them even had blonde girlfriends also dressed up in all the gear.
The two female arch-feminists I was with on the day howled with laughter, absolutely delighted by this demonstration of the silliness of men.
Let me say at once that it did, actually, look a bit silly. But that's not the point. The point is that only men could romanticise this activity to the extent of dressing up like Michael Schumacher and going off to hold races at Belfield with their toy cars. The arch-feminists, meanwhile, were going off to correct students' assignments - not romantic at all.
But aren't women more intuitive than men and isn't that tied up with the whole romantic-type thing? Er, sorry but that's not true either.
Women may think they are more intuitive and may have convinced everybody else that there is a thing called "feminine intuition" but the evidence suggests otherwise.
A recent study of more than 15,000 people for the Edinburgh International Science Festival found that 78 percent of women and 58 per cent of men considered themselves to be highly intuitive.
Psychologist Richard Wiseman showed them photographs of people smiling. Some had faked their smiles and some were smiling genuinely. It turned out that men were better than women at spotting fake smiles in the opposite sex. Two thirds - 67 per cent - of women guessed correctly when men were faking their smiles. However, 76 per cent of men could tell that women were faking it. So who's more intuitive?
If it's the case that women have been fooling us into believing they are more romantic than we are, and if it's not true, then a few things will have to change.
For instance, Mother's Day currently means flowers, chocolates and dinner for the women but Father's Day means three new pairs of socks for the men. It ought to be the other way around.
Not everything has to change, though. Have you seen that billboard promoting the floristry industry which says something like, "Moody Cow. Don't know what you did wrong? Send her flowers anyway".
It's a brilliant ad which feeds into this idea that there's something more mysterious and romantic about women than there is about us men. So if she's being a moody cow she's not just being a moody cow: she's being something complex which a mere man could not possibly understand, because she's the romantic, intuitive one and he is not.
Guess what, guys? Chances are, she's just being a moody cow, end of mystery. But send her the flowers anyway. Because you, after all, are the romantic and that's the sort of thing romantics do.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.