IT WAS some time during the first drink (which I paid for) on our first date that my wife twisted my arm up my back and forced me to sign a pre-nuptial agreement. In blood. Mine.

It contained a lot of small print but basically it meant that what was mine was hers and what was hers was her own. A bit like heads she wins, tails I lose.

It seemed a reasonable deal. She was earning as much, if not more than me; she was taking on a widower with a young daughter; and as she had some fairly wealthy relatives, she was a woman of great expectations. It was a chance to swell the Hearld millions - and she was not that bad to look at.

So we settled down to a life of domestic and financial bliss, an equal partnership in which both partners pulled their weight with household chores and bills, and each took turns to spend hours on the phone just trying to get through the killer maze of speaking to our bank.

OUR bank, you notice. Because we turned out to be one of those rare, dinosaur couples who have joint bank accounts. That meant no arguments over who pays for what, no divvying up on pay day, no bickering about who's coughing up for the mortgage this month, or the latest trip to the supermarket.

It also meant, if you'll forgive the cynicism, we had the chance to keep an eye on what the other was spending.

It has taken many years for me to persuade my wife that she does not have to hide her purchases, smuggling new frocks into the house in an Asda carrier bag and secreting them into a wardrobe to be pulled out at a later date to the insistence that "Oh, you've seen it before. I've had it ages."

I have finally convinced her that I don't mind what she spends on herself, whether it is make-up or clothes. She works hard, she has earned it.

Anyway, I want her to look nice. She was not that well-blessed by nature, so she needs all the help that money can buy.

But there are limits. She is not the Imelda Marcos of shoe collecting, thank God. With her, it's tights. She has unopened packets going back to the day that nylon was invented. Sheer, micro-hose this, lace-topped that. They are jumbled into spaghetti knots in plastic bags, so many, it seems that they fall out of drawers in the bedroom, hang on nails in the woodshed and even come crackling out of the deep freeze.

I don't mind as long as she does not want to encroach into my four, full wardrobes.

Thank goodness we don't have the storage problems of many couples, the paper mountains that come from separate bank accounts.

I know one couple who have lived together for donkey's years, but she is buying the house and he pays his rent - in cash - every pay day. They do the supermarket sweep and then go halves, as they do when they go on holiday. Neither one asks the health of the other's bank balance or is interested when their partner's credit card statement lands on the doormat.

Call me old fashioned, but I think that smacks of lack of commitment. I was dragged up in a family where dad was the wage-earner, mum was stay-at-home mum. He handed over the housekeeping every Friday night and kept some back to run his struggling, one-man business. If mum ran out of cash, she would borrow a bit from dad's trouser pocket hanging on the bed head while he slept.

All this independent financial enterprise going on within marriages and partnerships makes me wonder who has got it right. But I'm happy with our one joint account - and the Swiss numbered account that I must tell her about some day.

...as for the attempt to give up smoking I mentioned last week, I'm persevering, despite the odd glitch. The patches make me itch, the deprivation makes me insatiably hungry, and, apparently, I'm a pain in the backside.

Updated: 09:41 Tuesday, January 11, 2005