Pleasing your Alpha Female

A few years ago Murray Partridge realised he was not the most important person in his marriage. He was flicking through a magazine when he stumbled across a photograph of his wife, the jewellery designer Solange Azagury-Partridge. The picture looked odd. Her arm was jutting out at a strange angle and, to her left, was a blurry, indistinct area of colour. Slowly, the penny dropped.

"I'd been airbrushed out," he says in the kitchen of the family home in west London. "Normally, they crop me out, but this time they'd gone to real trouble."

He was, he realised, married to an Alpha Female. He had been relegated to the role of Beta Male. He started speaking to his friends about it, many of whom were in the same predicament, and the germ of an idea started to form.

Now Partridge, 59, and his friend Simon Marks, 49, have co-written a book entitled How to Live With an Alpha Female. The result is effectively a guide to cohabiting with someone who will always be more successful, more creative, more wealthy and more organised than you.

"Part of having an Alpha Female for a partner is accepting that, whatever you've done, your AF has probably done it bigger and better," they write in the introduction.

While Partridge's wife oversees a multimillion-pound empire, designs jewellery for celebrities including Kate Winslet and Thandie Newton and has her work held in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Marks's wife, Mel Agace, is a highly successful film producer and property developer.

Their husbands can never hope to compete.

Both Partridge and Marks used to have respectable jobs of their own - Partridge in advertising, Marks in the music business - but these days their work has taken something of a back seat.

Their main role in life is now to support the needs and whims of their infinitely more impressive spouses. Except that Partridge and Marks are more likely to be carrying spare phone chargers. ("In this way you can ensure that you will not end up bearing the brunt of a potentially dangerous mood swing brought on by a flat battery," they write.)

Although their approach is humorous, the book makes a serious point about our changing sociological landscape.

One in four British women under the age of 24 earns more than their partner, according to research. Female managers and professionals now number 70million worldwide.

"I felt an affinity with Denis Thatcher," says Partridge, with a misty-eyed look, "and admired his obsession with golf and drinking. And Prince Philip, of course, has got to be the king of men in our position."

In her 2013 book, The XX Factor, economist Alison Wolf made the argument that professional, educated women now behave far more like their highly educated male counterparts than the rest of womankind. Essentially, most Alpha Females now find themselves in a situation where they need a traditional 1950s-style wife.

"It's a difficult thing for a lot of men to be with women who can hold their own in every department and who don't need us," says Partridge. "There's a social stigma to being called a 'house husband' but you need to be strong enough to be totally okay with it."

Besides, they have their uses.

There is a list in their book of a Beta Male's Main Areas of Control and these include heavy lifting, unblocking lavatories and driving long distances ("valuable e-mailing time for her").

"The list never changes," Partridge says wearily. "Although sometimes things get added to it - particularly nasty things like 'cleaning the roof' or anything dangerous."

Recently, Partridge has found that he's expected to turn over the mattress in the marital bed every eight weeks, "and that's a horrible job. It's this enormous mattress, it's incredibly heavy and you have to take off all the bedclothes..."

After the requisite mattress-turning, it transpires that the only place where an Alpha Female wants a man to take charge is the bedroom.

Here, we are told, they expect complete role reversal. "At short notice, you will be expected to transform from being a supportive, attentive Beta Male outside the bedroom into a raging, dominating, hard-sh - - - Alpha b - - - inside it," they write. "It's quite a difficult thing," acknowledges Marks quietly.

How to Live With an Alpha Female also warns its readers that an Alpha Female will take control of almost every aspect of their partner's life. This can have some advantages (dinners are organised, invitations are answered, bills are paid on time and holidays are booked as if by magic) but can also leave a Beta Male in a state of paralysing indecision over simple, everyday functions such as what to wear.

"Any relationship is about control," says Marks. Pause.

"And I don't really have any."

- The Sunday Telegraph