He was off to a sunlit beer garden to soak up a few leisurely pints.
I was spending the afternoon in Ikea.

This provoked howls of sympathy from the best man and my brother's mates in general.

In this weather? On a Saturday? Isn't there some way you can get out of it?

"Enjoy your freedom while you can, boys," I said.

We were, after all, being fitted for wedding suits. And as sure as night follows day, the march down the aisle at a wedding ceremony invariably leads to the trudge around the aisles of the international home products retailer.

I mean no disrespect to Ikea, which is a fine shop.

But it cannot disguise from me my own inadequacies as a husband.

Try as I might, I just can't get excited about buying furniture.

There are women who will tell you that a trip to Ikea is as much of a chore for them as for any man, it's just that someone's got to do it.

Such women are liars.

No? Just look at the couples in Ikea, and see the gender divide exposed.
The women are in their element, fizzing with life, their eyes darting about as they swoop on this product and that.

But the men, well... Watch us and weep.

Like sleep-walking zombies we shuffle and slouch, limp and bleary as a defeated army on the retreat from some humiliating skirmish.

At such times it occurs to me that the ideal man is not, as women might have you believe, George Clooney.

Oh no. He's Gok Wan.

Say what you like about Gok, he'd be a better Ikea shopper than most men.

If he were to suddenly appear from behind an Aspvik filing cabinet, he'd be mobbed by grateful wives, ecstatic at the sight of a kindred spirit in a male body.

Once this thought had occurred, I couldn't stop thinking about Gok. Which made me feel wan.

I was still recovering when I heard a woman's voice say: "... and we need one of these, don't we?"

I was about to nod when I realised that the speaker was not my wife, but a complete stranger, whose husband, slouching along behind me, nodded his own weary assent, scarcely bothering to check what it was he was agreeing to buy.

With so much male passivity on display, a horrible thought occurred: Is this the epitome of married life in a consumer society? Sleep-walking down the aisle of a furniture store on a sunny Saturday?

Some gloomy philosopher once said that the general level of human happiness would hardly be altered if all marriages were made at random. I think he'd have understood how I felt in Ikea, where to be a man is to feel as redundant as a stale Scandinavian meatball, and as devoid of romance as a flat-pack shoe rack.

There is romance in married life. But a man who finds any of it in Ikea is not the sort of man that I am.