The similarities between myself and George Clooney have long been apparent, so long as you overlook my lack of hair and his silver sheen of handsomeness.

Similarly, the parallels between Mrs Clooney and my wife have long been apparent, apart from a few differences that are hardly worth mentioning.

Amal Clooney is also an international human rights barrister. The last time I checked, my wife isn’t one of those.

At the time of writing, she has just messaged to say her bus is stuck in traffic. That’s my wife and not the other Mrs C. Amal might catch a bus sometimes, but if she does it’s not something you hear much about.

Still, here we are, the pair of us, so easily confused with George and Amal, however unlikely that may seem. George is a Hollywood actor who makes women swoon. While it is a truth universally acknowledged that I am a retired journalist who made one woman swoon once long ago.

For some reason, my wife isn’t photographed wherever she goes, unlike Amal, who belongs to the secular royalty loved by newspapers. Snap, snap – there she goes.

Thanks to her work, Amal has also annoyed Donald Trump, so bully for her. She could be barred from entering the US by the Tango Man after a panel she sat on recommended an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, on war crimes charges in Gaza.

Meanwhile, that bus my wife sat on has now crawled its way to the station.

Pardon the preamble, but that’s the way the words roll some days.

Here is the point of all this meandering.

The similarity between us is that we don’t argue. This is not to say that I don’t argue with Clooney or his wife, as I’ve never met them. It’s that I don’t argue with my wife, who I have met many times.

We have been married for 38 years, together for 40 or so. And we don’t argue. While my doppelganger George Clooney last week told a US morning TV show that he and Amal, who have been married for 12 years, have not had one argument.

“Is George Clooney right not to argue?” asked the headline above a report in the Guardian.

That depends on your views about rows.

Stefan Walters, a therapist quoted in the article, said: “Actually, arguing is a great skill for couples. Couples who argue actually end up staying together much more than couples who don’t.”

I’d argue that there is a man who says ‘actually’ more often than is strictly necessary, but there you go.

I asked a friend at badminton, who is in his eighties, for his views on marital quarrels. He said arguments had sustained him and his wife through more than 60 years of marriage.

They didn’t have huge arguments, he said, just one of them telling the other they hadn’t done what they were supposed to have done. By his telling, he was usually the one being ticked off, but they always made up.

With us there have been sulks and silences, although too few to mention. I guess I have the verbal fluency to argue, but not the inclination. My wife says she would probably cry if we did argue.

Someone I know used to argue with his wife all the time, usually on the phone, sometimes in person. It seemed to suit them, although they argued their way out of that marriage in the end.

We don’t argue and are still married. Our world view is similar, although my wife has a lower tolerance for politics, news and other worrisome things. When fed up with me, if you can imagine such an unlikely occurrence, she might perhaps go into the garden for some angry digging.

She has never yet dug a hole big enough to drop me into, which is encouraging.