We are taught that - at its most basic level - a shit test is a rapport break.

But I don't think this is always true - indeed, I think this advice can be counter productive because the noob hears it and sees every second word out of his wife's mouth as a shit test. I think some shit tests are actually clumsy attempts to seek masculine approval.

Hear me through: Men bond by saying nasty things to each other they don't really mean. Let's face it, we've all been on a night out with the boys where we've said things to each other that we'd never say to a woman and we're still friends the next day. To maintain social order, we have a number of ways to differentiate this from real, "sort your act out" criticism: tone of voice, knowing subjects to avoid, knowing when you're going to far. Brits, I think, do this rather more than Americans do, so YMMV.

Women don't really do this. So on the whole they haven't really absorbed the fine details of "how to say things without being taken too seriously". When a woman does this, I think as often as not she's trying to copy what she's seen men do and how it brings male friends together.

Fortunately, the way we deal with this is largely the same way we'd deal with it from a male friend: agree and amplify, for instance. But it does put a different spin on things and also excludes a number of canned shit test responses: taking the nuclear option and calling out such behaviour is suddenly the worst possible thing you could do because it marks you out as being the one who's over-sensitive and woefully unable to read social cues.