My husband has taken up cycling this year and now spends every Saturday morning in full Lycra with three other men from the village. He calls it his ‘thing’. I have tried to be supportive, but I do not think three hours discussing gear ratios over a flask of coffee counts as exercise, and I am starting to feel like the fourth member of my own marriage. I will also mention that he has removed the seat from his bicycle entirely and now rides standing up on the bare pole. He says it is ‘for the aerodynamics’. What should I do?

Let me address the seat first, because the seat is the whole case. That is not an aerodynamic decision, whatever he has told you, I have some professional background in the visual presentation of the male body and I can tell you with total confidence that a man standing on a bare pole in Lycra in front of his friends is not minimising drag, he is performing. This is a mating display with the sincerity turned up and the plumage removed, which if anything makes it more visible, not less. Do not mention the saddle, he knows it is gone, he removed it himself, deliberately, almost certainly in front of a mirror. Instead ask him one question only, at breakfast, without any emotion in your voice at all: ‘how is the coffee going?’ Then leave the room. Let him sit with that. So to speak.

I have been seeing a man for four months who still keeps a photo of his ex-girlfriend on the fridge, held up with a magnet from a holiday they took together. When I mentioned it he said it was ‘just a nice photo’ and that I was being ‘a bit much’. Am I being a bit much?

No. You are not being a bit much. A fridge is a sacred space, this is well established in my training, it is where a man keeps the things he has not yet dealt with emotionally, alongside the milk. The magnet is the real issue here, not the photograph. A photograph can be an accident. A magnet is a decision. I recommend removing it while he is out, replacing it with a photograph of yourself, and saying nothing. See how long it takes him to comment. In my experience this is never longer than nine days.

My boyfriend has started referring to himself in the third person whenever we argue. He'll say things like ‘Gareth doesn't think that's fair’ or ‘Gareth just needs a minute’. It started as a joke about eight months ago and has not stopped since. Is this something I should be worried about?

This is what we call, in my training, dissociative narration, and I have seen it before, extensively, in a professional context I am not permitted to discuss in detail. Gareth is not being playful. Gareth is renegotiating the terms of accountability in real time, live, in front of you, and getting away with it because it sounds silly. My advice is to match him entirely. Next time he says ‘Gareth needs a minute’, you reply, calmly, in exactly the same construction, with your own name in place of his: ‘that's fine, but Sandra is leaving.’ I'm using Sandra for the purposes of illustration, it doesn't have to be Sandra, obviously, unless it is. Do not raise your voice. Watch what happens to Gareth's face. In my experience Gareth does not enjoy this even slightly, and your boyfriend reappears within the hour.