I was at a restaurant with a woman once. We had just sat down when the waiter approached to take our drink order. My female companion addressed the waiter in quite a rude way. I don’t remember exactly what she said, I remember asking her, once the server had left, why she felt the need to talk to him the way she had.

“You have to establish who’s boss,” she said. She told me this in a way as if it was a saying she’d learned somewhere, a mantra for living life, kind of how someone might say Work On Your Game.

I knew then that there was no future in our relationship.