That's men for you: Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health.
Are you a mammy's boy? Does your wife claim, as Princess Diana once famously did, that there are three persons in your marriage? Only she doesn't mean Camilla - she means the mammy.
When you married, did you pop back to the mammy for your dinner every evening as soon as you came back from the honeymoon?
Would the concept of not going to her for Sunday dinner be unthinkable?
When you were a child, would the mammy take the hot water bottle out of your sister's bed on a cold night to keep your feet warm? And if there was only enough money to send yourself or your sister to college was it yourself who was sent?
If you are a mammy's boy and you marry, I suspect it will be to one of two kinds of women. The first is the kind who was reared to be with someone like you - namely a woman who will mind you. That should work if it is what you were both looking for and if you both remain happy with the choice.
On the other hand, you may have married a strong, independent woman who, for some reason best known only to Dr Freud, decided you were the man of her dreams.
If that is who you married, then she may no longer be very happy with her situation.
There is a fair chance that one day you will be back with the mammy while your ex-wife goes off to get a life.
Anybody who has ever had adolescent children knows one of the tasks of adolescence is to separate out from parents. It is a messy business, usually accompanied by much slamming of doors, thundering and stomping around the place. Still, it has to be done.
But if you are a mammy's boy who never actually separated out from your mother, then your wife can feel herself to be an outsider in a family made up of you, your mother and possibly your father as well.
If the marriage is to be a reasonably good one, the husband has to take the vital step of putting his wife in first place and leaving his parents' home, psychologically, for good.
It's easier said than done. Some manage it and some do not.
I was led to these reflections after coming across the phrase "mama's boy" in a book called The Nonsexist Word Finder: A Dictionary of Gender-Free Usage by Rosalie Maggio.
That doesn't sound like the sort of book a person would want to spend time with, but it turns out to be one of those volumes that can occupy hours when you should be doing something more important, like earning a living.
Ms Maggio's dictionary provides alternatives to words and phrases that could be regarded as sexist.
On the topic of the mammy's boy, Ms Maggio expresses the view that this concept encourages many parents to deny their sons the warm nurturing they need - for fear that they will turn into mammy's boys. Some of them spend their lives seeking that warmth, "often in inappropriate ways".
What really stopped me in my tracks was her dismissal of the word "mammy"! Yes, shocking I know, especially if you are a mammy's boy yourself.
The term mammy should be avoided, she declares. "This term is sexist [ there is no parallel name for a man], racist, and a stereotype that was probably always highly mythical."
I assume from her name that Ms Maggio is not Irish. Had she been so, I wonder would she have been so quick to dismiss the mammy?
And if you are ever tempted to describe your nearest and dearest, in your own mind, as a castrating bitch or a castrating woman, Ms Maggio advises you to "avoid these expressions. They blame women for something that takes two to accomplish. It is not possible to castrate a secure, independent person; the man is not an anaesthetised patient in this type of surgery."
Well, no, I suppose not - unless, of course, it's the mammy who is doing the surgery.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.