Here is a game to play with your spouse one chilly evening, writes Lucy Kellaway

Sit yourselves down with some paper, Sellotape, string and a pair of scissors. Working together, construct a paper tower that is strong and beautiful. You have 30 minutes to do it.

This fun little game has been devised by the most famous marriage counsellor in the world. John Gottman has seen 3,000 couples pass through his "Love Labs" in the US and has set many of them to work on the towers. He has found that couples who co-operate well over the scissors and glue tend to have good marriages that stick. Ones that can't share the glue nicely are likely to fall apart. I haven't yet managed to play this tower game with my husband, partly because he is always out. But also because I don't need to: I know exactly what would happen. We would both insist we knew best how to do it, and would deride the other's efforts. I would end up pushing him to one side doing it myself and then would complain that it is always me who does everything (displaying what he calls my Control-Freak-Martyr Syndrome).

This morning I told him about the game and that our marriage was doomed. Half-asleep and hung-over he seemed unmoved by the news. Rubbish, he said. Couples with lasting marriages know how to avoid getting into paper-tower-building situations in the first place.

He's right, and one could extend the principle. Couples with lasting marriages also know how to avoid doing other things together such as putting up Ikea furniture, doing DIY, cooking or discussing the quickest way of driving from A to B.

The reason that I'm suddenly taking such a keen interest in the health of my marriage is the fault of the Harvard Business Review, which has decided that understanding how marriages work is important to the study of management.

Its reasoning goes like this: being successful in business means having good relationships with people. The most important relationship is a marriage. Therefore people who have good marriages are likely to have good relationships with their colleagues too. And by understanding why marriages go wrong we get some understanding of why work relationships go wrong - which is why I went out to interview Dr Gottman for some tips.

There are so many fallacies and so much confusion in this that one hardly knows where to start. The central one is the idea that people with good marriages also have good relationships at work. I have never seen a shred of evidence to support this, and I can't see why it might be true even in theory.

We are different people at home and at work - which is just as well. I know one man who has the sweetest relationship with his wife. But once through the office doors he is a monster. His relationships with his colleagues are dysfunctional and ugly.

Equally, the reverse is often true, especially with women.

At work I'm a pussycat, compliant and pathetically keen to please. At home I am a tyrant, brooking no opposition from anyone.

The nature of the two relationships is quite different. At work the stakes are lower: you don't need to like each other, you just need to rub along to get a job done. This, surely, is what building paper towers is all about. Indeed if I had to do this with any of my colleagues I would buckle down and do it co-operatively.

At home the stakes are enormous: you are dealing with love and life and the explosive business of whose turn it is to unpack the dishwasher. At home you can behave as badly as you like, while at work it is generally a good idea to act with a little dignity.

After decades of research, Dr Gottman has concluded that there are four things that derail a marriage - criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling and contempt - which he calls the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The first three frequently clip-clop through our house with no particularly apocalyptic effect. Ditto they are to be found everywhere in offices - they are a fact of life.

Only the fourth horseman - contempt - strikes me as a truly unwelcome visitor in any relationship at all. But then you don't need to have observed 3,000 marriages to work that out. And so are there any parallels at all between marriages and work relationships? There may be a negative one: success at work may go hand in hand with failure in matrimony. Successful people have bigger egos, are in the office all the time and have lots of money and opportunity to stray.

Beyond that, I don't even accept the basic premise that a high "emotional quotient" is necessary at work and at home. It is helpful at work as it allows one to duck and weave through many complex relationships and manipulate them to advantage. But at home a low EQ may be best as it may help one stick with the status quo.

The secret to a lasting marriage is due to two things. First it is a matter of selecting someone vaguely suitable. This is the only true parallel between the two spheres - recruiting the right people is crucial too. Beyond that, what distinguishes lasting marriages is the mutual expectation that the union will abide, come hell or high water - or come scissors and glue.