This Friday, couples everywhere will be settling down for a romantic meal together.

Candles, soft music and maybe the odd rose or two will be used to create the perfect atmosphere for whispering sweet nothings.

Sadly, this will not happen in my home. We have candles. We could, if we wished, have soft music, and we have flowers (left over from my birthday), but together these things will not provoke any behaviour that could be described as ‘lovey-dovey’.

Throughout the year, meal times in my house are scenes of anger and torment. Rows are present from the outset, when my husband will shout at one of my daughters for not helping to put out cutlery or water.

Then I will join in, when one child fails to drag herself out of her room and come down to eat on time. There will then be arguments about various things, from eating habits to texting, to moaning about the food. The meal usually ends with me screaming at someone for allowing the cats on the table.

This pattern has become so ingrained in family life that when my husband and I dine alone, the same thing happens. He reprimands me for not carrying something to the table, I get cross when he disappears to the toilet after having served the food – something he does every night for some unknown reason – and he annoys me further by insisting on coating everything in sauce.

I irritate him by mentioning how much better my curries taste (only because he does this to me when I cook), then we shout at each other when the cats jump onto the table.

At this stage in our 30-year relationship, I’d say the likelihood of us getting divorced far outweighs that of having a romantic meal.

When you have been together for as long as we have, sweet nothings don’t feature on the menu. I admit, if we went out for a meal things would be marginally better.

The cats wouldn’t be there for a start, and we haven’t reached that dreadful, stagnant stage of a relationship where couples sit for two hours chewing on naan bread, with nothing to say.

But fellow diners would definitely not overhear “I love you”. It would be more like: “Did you pay the gas bill?” or “Did you pick up some kitchen towels?”

On Friday we will stay at home and have a distinctly unromantic dinner – a toss up between egg and chips or a stir fry; there are no oysters or other aphrodisiac nonsense in my fridge – in an unromantic setting. If the light is dim, it’s because a bulb has blown and I’m sure to spend ten minutes lecturing my husband as to why he forgot to replace it.