Picture the candle-lit scene; the music is soft, and essential oils are being tenderly massaged into your body. Love is in the air, and all the signs are that this romantic soiree is set to conclude in time-honoured fashion.
There's just one niggle. You cough, look up from the rug you are lying on by the crackling open fire and ask your handsome, semi-clothed husband: 'Did you take your pill today, darling?'
Now imagine the sound an old-fashioned record player makes when you pull the plug out - because that's going to be the end of tonight's entertainment.
'Did you take your pill?' Imagine the sound an old-fashioned record player makes when you pull the plug out
The revelation that Australian scientists have developed a male pill which prevents sperm from leaving the body (without, apparently, interfering with the male hormone balance) is possibly the least sexy bit of news about birth control to surface in the last 40 years.
Could anything be more guaranteed to undermine a man's natural feelings of virility and masculinity, those key components of the male sex drive, than taking a little white pill to stop his spermatozoa achieving escape velocity?
I consider myself an intelligent, sophisticated man of the world, but there is no circumstance in which I would take the male pill - to me it represents an assault on everything it means to be a man.
While few women are overly delighted to be pumping their bodies full of oestrogen daily by taking the 'female pill', I don't believe it represents the same psychological attack on what it means to be a woman as the male pill does.
Indeed many feminists argue that much of what it means to be a woman today is actually defined by and is a result of women having access to the Pill. It has liberated, not diminished, them.
But for men, it's different - we have never had to live in fear of getting pregnant.
Male pill: To me, it represents an assault one everything it means to be a man
Men don't get varicose veins, swollen legs, nausea, and as even the most ardent advocate of equal rights would be forced to concede, we don't have to give birth.
And it means that instead of seeing the upsides to a chemical vasectomy (as the new procedure is being dubbed, because men can still achieve orgasm and ejaculate, just as they do after a physical vasectomy) men who willingly allow themselves to be sterilised, whether via a pill or a scalpel, will always remain a massive minority.
Why? Because to most of us, the very essence of manhood is tied to our potency. Yes, sex is enormously pleasurable, but somewhere, hard-wired into our psyche, the idea that we can pass our genes on and create a whole new human being makes us feel (and I cringe writing this) more of a man.
Like it or not the figures back this up. Currently, just 16 per cent of British men are sterilised. How many of the rest have wives or girlfriends on the Pill, using the coil or diaphragm, or who've been sterilised? The majority, I would venture, because few couples, married or otherwise, don't use birth control.
In theory, men like me should cheer the arrival of the male pill, because it has one significant advantage over physical sterilisation - if you stop taking it, within a few weeks you will be fertile again.
And a few years ago, nine months after our second child was born, and caught between the devil of my daughter's nappies and the deep blue sea of my son's teething, I found myself pondering a vasectomy.
'I consider myself an intelligent, sophisticated man of the world, but there is no circumstance in which I would take the male pill'
We had two gorgeous healthy children, one of each flavour. We didn't want any more.
My wife didn't like the Pill when she took it briefly early in our marriage and, like many women after childbirth, she definitely didn't want to start taking it again. So why not never have to buy another packet of condoms again?
Well, according to a 2010 paper in the journal Contraception, between seven and ten per cent of men admit that they regret having the operation. Imagine if any other life-changing operation had such a percentage of dissatisfied customers! As we know, men don't typically like to admit to massive, life-altering blunders, so the true number who wake up one morning bereft at the loss of their fertility must be huge.
I then learnt that five per cent of men actually have another operation to try to reverse the procedure - the number would be far higher were it not so tricky and expensive (£5,000 to £10,000) and is not available on the NHS.
Reversing a physical vasectomy involves cutting open the scrotum of the man in question, and trying to join up the snipped and tied vas deferens - the tubes which carry our little swimmers - with the aid of a powerful microscope.
Imagine trying to join two pieces of slippery cotton thread end to end and you'll understand why reversal has a success rate of between 25 and 75 per cent, depending on how long after the initial operation you change your mind.
But what really put me off was this little statistic: ten per cent of men admit to experiencing loss of libido after having a vasectomy.
The problem with the male pill: It assumes that men are as responsible as women
This is despite there being absolutely no biological reason why this should happen - in fact, testosterone levels in the body actually increase after a vasectomy. So we're left with only one logical conclusion. In undergoing the snip, men invariably feel that their entire identity as a virile, potent, procreating being has been stolen.
The clincher came when I spoke to an older friend who had the snip after his wife gave birth to their three children. He confessed that he had experienced a greatly reduced sex drive and difficulty getting an erection since the operation.
'I know it's all in my head,' he told me, 'And it shouldn't be any different to when she was on the Pill, but sex just feels totally pointless. I know it sounds stupid, but it's the truth.'
I didn't think it sounded stupid.
Everything about our sex drive is in the head, and it is hardly surprising some men find the idea of no longer being fertile an enormous sexual downer. It's not that my friend wanted more kids, but the fact that he couldn't have any more represented a primeval attack on his sense of masculinity.
It's hard not to imagine all these psycho-sexual problems after a chemical vasectomy.
There's one other huge problem with the male pill, of course. It assumes that men are as responsible as women. It assumes a man would never tell a lie to get a woman into bed. It assumes men have the same incentive to be 100 per cent confident when it comes to contraception as women.
You might just be able to argue these things were true within a long-term, legally-binding, loving marriage, and while I am not suggesting contraception should be exclusively the responsibility of the woman, the fact is that when unwanted babies do come along, it is almost always the women who pay the price.
In an ideal world, men would always shoulder their part of their burden, but it only takes a walk around any town centre to see the single mothers pushing their buggies to prove the world is far from ideal. Women can't rely on men to protect them from unwanted pregnancies.
For that reason I would strongly advise any young woman not to trust the word of a lover who declared, 'I promise, I'm on the pill' in the heat of the moment. Condoms have their drawbacks, but being able to claim he is wearing one when he's not isn't one.
'You just don't want to pump your body full of chemicals, but you think it's fine for us to,' a female friend said to me recently when I spoke to her about why I would never take the male pill.
And while it is true that ingesting drugs that interfere with my reproductive system is one of my many reservations about this possible future birth control method, I have enough education to know the female Pill gave women control over their bodies and reproductive systems for the first time in history.
What an extraordinary capitulation it would be if all that hard-won power to decide whether a woman wanted a sexual encounter to result in a kid was handed back to men!
So, like most men in Britain, I decided against the snip. I talked about it with my wife, and in her heart of hearts she understood that what I was saying was true - that for a man, fertility equals virility.
And, today I feel so lucky I didn't have it. In January, we are expecting our third child.
And after that, we are going to stop. Really. And if that finds me, slipping a pack of Durex in with my deodorant at the chemist, I can live with that - but no way will I take a pill to stop my little guys going for a swim.
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