BY DELILAH ENDURA, DULL MALE EDITOR

SHE SURVIVED Star Wars and Harry Potter, she says, and the Marvel Universe, and lining up for an iPad at midnight, and endless mindless video games, but when her husband tried to introduce her to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Ellie Jools slipped into a coma.

Fifteen weeks later, she is conscious but still on life support. She speaks via a computer device and breathes using air cleaned of even the tiniest trace of orcs and hobbits and gold rings and wizards.

“It was Gandalf,” she explained from her hospital bed, where she lives inside a bubble to protect her from men with juvenile life interests. “Look, I have nothing against Tolkien, but I thought I had married a man. Five hours discussing Gandalf convinced me otherwise.

“As our marriage progressed my husband gradually regressed. He still reads Harry Potter and watches Spiderman and Dr Strange and Stranger Things and stuff like that. I can’t remember when we last watched an adult film. I don’t mean porn, though I guess that might be something, no, I mean something for grown ups, you know, like Five Easy Pieces or Witness or Barry Lyndon or The Third Man, or La Dolce Vita, or, God help me, Gone With The Wind. It all became too much. I guess my mind and then my body dissolved.

“Do men know how pathetic they sound when the extent of their conversation is the next Star Wars vehicle? When Top Gun: Maverick is an Oscar tip?

“I used to just put up with football because I loved him; now I long for a discussion about footy. I don’t know if our marriage can survive. My fear is that there’s nothing else out there, even if I wanted to leave him. I live in terror for what my son will develop into.”

Psychologist Alfred Sense, author of The Descent of Decent Men says it’s a common complaint today: “We live in an age when Tarantino is the ultimate in sophisticated dialogue and once great movie stars find themselves doing comic strip films. *Panem et circenses. Men are in full retreat. Nowhere to go but childhood. And as women rise, the gap between them gets wider and wider. It’s scary. And dull.”

*Bread and circuses – ED