What pleasures have you ever given up for your beloved?

There must be something. Maybe he didn't like you going out with the girls, and you begrudgingly agreed to stay at home ironing his shirts on a Friday night.

Perhaps you've stopped wearing your favourite micro skirts, because hubby disapproved. Or maybe you've given up chocolate after your beloved saw a hippo on the telly and made a rude comment about your bottom.

Men in particular often find themselves pressured by their partners to abandon some of their little pleasures. Like going down the pub, watching football on the telly, or spending hours on the golf course.

As any woman will vouch, it's not an easy task to get your other half to scrap his best-loved pastimes. You need to apply a hefty amount of female wile and guile - although some may call it bribery and manipulation - to persuade him to give in.

Women are equally as stubborn and unwilling to give up the things they enjoy, as was highlighted by the recent court case in which a wife was stabbed by her husband after she refused to give up smoking.

That's taking things a bit too far, but the case struck a chord with me because, although I left the knives safely in the kitchen drawer, I went to great lengths to force my husband to reject the deadly weed.

We had not been together long when I politely asked him to stop smoking. But, despite my womanly ways - eyelash-fluttering, lip-pouting and hip-wiggling - he was having none of it.

So I insisted on buying his cigarettes, returning from the shop with all manner of revolting, high-tar brands, or silly-looking coloured fags with gold filters. Still, he puffed away. When I banned cigarettes from our flat, he smoked in the pub.

It came to a head when, on a day out in the country, he nipped into a shop and bought a pack of 20. I snatched them from him and stuffed them into a nearby post box. A huge argument resulted, but it was the turning point. He hasn't - to my knowledge - smoked since.

After that, getting him to give up other things came easy and, to date, the number of discarded pleasures stands at 2008, the top three being sex, boozing and having a laugh with his mates.

If that sounds harsh, bear in mind that I've made plenty of sacrifices for him. I only see my friends on five nights a week not six and, because he hates soaps, I only watch Brookside during the week, not the Omnibus as well. That's a heck of a knock to my quality of life.

The things we do for love...

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.