Just say you are having a row with your loved one. Insecurities and past slights well up as you shout at each other. Or perhaps one of you stays sullen and silent while the other one does the yelling.

Familiar? Do you ever take time out to sit down, write out the grievances and then, in consultation with your partner, work out a mutually convenient time when both of you will be feeling rational and receptive to work the situation out to a conclusion acceptable to both?

No? Well then, if you don't, you are one of the ever-shrinking number of emotionally-challenged adults who need the wisdom of John Gray. Dr Gray is the conceptualist (for surely author is inadequate to describe such a phenomenon) behind the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus series.

And if ever I feel like going to live on another planet, or suspect that perhaps I was an alien implanted in my mother's womb, it is when I look around and see the staggering success of these banal self-help books. Around 10 million of them have been sold since MAFM, WAFV hit the bookstands in 1993. Seven million of those were in the US (where something like 2,000 self-help books are published every year) and three million worldwide. It is the most successful self-help book in history, eclipsing the likes of I'm OK, You're OK (ah, but that was in simpler times). Norman Vincent Peale's classic The Power of Positive Thinking, based on a Christian ethos, has only managed a measly two million sold in 50 years.

So whatever else John Gray might be, he is seriously rich. This 47-year-old Texan's life seems to have been influenced by three key factors: transcendental meditation, a gender lecturer called Joe Tannenbaum, and a woman called Bonnie, his second and current wife. I spoke to him on the phone, but from his pictures and other descriptions he is a stocky man, a somewhat rubbery version of the mid-century American actor Paul Birch. He doesn't sound as rehearsed as one might expect.

The young Gray was a devotee of transcendental meditation (and even worked as personal assistant to the Maharishi) until celibate life lost its charm when he was in his late 20s.

Returning from India, he started a business giving seminars on how to improve your love life, with his first wife, Barbara de Angelis. But in those days the message was that men and women were the same: they all, perhaps, came from Saturn.

After his marriage to Barbara broke up and Gray himself attended seminars given by Tannenbaum, his eyes were opened. His consciousness was raised. Hell, no, I won't go for that "we are all one" line any more. The rest is self-help history.

His first book (it was called Men, Women and Relationships) has just been re-released. For the Irish market it is called Mars and Venus: A Match Made in Heaven and is peppered with the key words: feelings, focused, support, understanding, love, pain, the whole damn thing. This book is tripe. So are its companions. Why do so many people buy them? Gray says: "You can't solve something until it makes sense. Mars and Venus is a pictorial metaphor. That one was inspired in 1983 when the movie ET was very popular, and I was giving a talk on the differences between men and women. I said: `Imagine your husband is an ET' and everybody laughed." One of Gray's other favourite metaphors which crops up frequently in his 10 books is that of the man lurking sulkily in his cave, while his woman hovers anxiously at the entrance. "An American Indian handed me the cave metaphor. In her tribe every woman who got married was given a little talk, and the message was that when your man goes into his cave, don't go in after him and you won't be burned." (Burned is what my note says, so I guess it's burned. You know what he means).

What about those who resent being pigeonholed as Martians or Venusians? "Coming to talk about anything and give advice without generalisations is impossible," he says. "I have counselled thousands of people. Healthy people have found these issues in their lives but there are people who aren't so healthy and don't relate."

What about the male backlash - the problem of gender identity, which undermines the old Tarzanesque stereotypes? "There's nothing intrinsically wrong with men. If you don't treat men with love and support, that is a mistake."

With such a brilliant ability to keep on-message, and to sell that message across the globe, has Gray ever considered going into politics? "No, I have no interest in politics, I think I have more influence with the books," he says. "It is the best-selling book internationally [after the Bible presumably]." His 11th book, just about to hit the streets, is MAMWAV, Children are from Heaven. "It is a parenting guide. I have spent 15 years testing it out," he says. "What I teach people is how to create co-operative children, not just obedient ones."

His first book, A Match Made in Heaven as it is now called, is, Gray says, "a much deeper book, in terms of understanding the difference between men and women. But I wanted to write a book that everybody would read, that is easy to assimilate, a fun easy book." What? Is he saying that Men, Women, and Relationships/A Match Made in Heaven is the intellectual template for the accessible Mars and Venus books? That it is hard for some people to understand? To simplify this would be like trying to create an easier-to-understand STOP sign.

I don't know if a comprehensive product range is yet in the pipeline, but Mars and Venus: A Match Made in Heaven, points strongly in the direction of themed stationery and bouquets of flowers, such is the insistence on letter-writing and flower-giving to put the pep back into flagging relationships. Gray also reminds readers of the accompanying benefits of listening to his patented audio-tapes to advise on relationships. It is a little disconcerting, as if Jeffrey Archer took time off in mid-flow to remind you to buy his next novel.

But hey. Can 10 million people be wrong? He is, after all, a canny old PhD (from Columbia Pacific by correspondence). What Gray does is painstakingly unpick our kneejerk reactions. Written out, they look awfully silly. But that is because they are silly. It is silly, when your partner asks you would you mind paying the credit card bill, to fly into a rage and shout that you have to do everything around here.

Gray traces, with that wonderful American lack of embarrassment, every feeling that feeds into such a response. But if words such as "feeling his/her own pain" make you clench your teeth, this - and any of its 10 siblings - is not the book for you.

Mars and Venus: A Match Made in Heaven? by John Gray is published by Newleaf, £6.99.