Fittingly, I was sitting in a bar in downtown San Francisco waiting for a date to arrive when I received the email. Could I write a few hundred words on the cliche that American women prefer British men?

The request made a sort of sense: I’m a Brit who recently moved to Northern California; my last girlfriend was American; as was the girlfriend before that. And the, well, five before that.

Even before I left London, I had enjoyed astounding luck with displaced Californians and Texans and girls from Philadelphia. The fact that every one of those relationships ended in hissing and yelling and floods of tears doesn’t alter the fact that for maybe a week – right at the start – these American girls were attracted to me: an occasionally-recovering alcoholic writer with a head shaped like a potato and a pathological inability to remember birthdays. My being British is the only possible explanation.

And yet, asking me to explain the attraction is a bit like wanting to know why mice love cheese, and asking the cheese to investigate. To really get to the bottom of the mystery, I’d really need to ask the women themselves. So that’s what I did. Still at the bar, I forwarded the request to all of the American girls I’ve been romantically involved with; or at least the ones who are still talking to me; and asked what made me, and my fellow countrymen, so irresistible.

The first replies came in almost immediately, and frankly I was glad I still had a drink in my hand when they did. Most acknowledged the power of the accent – “it’s Kryptonite to us” wrote Kelly from San Francisco – and of our endearing use of words like “bloody” and “darling”. Some mentioned our famed good manners, our habit of dressing well and our knowledge of literature. But all ended with the same caveat “…of course, that was before I actually got to know you.” Ouch. Indeed, the consensus seemed to be that, aside from the accent, the whole “British men are better” myth was precisely that – a myth, albeit an alluring one. Kate – a Californian in London who has dated as many Brits as I’ve dated Americans – summed it up best. “I’ve spent years looking for Mr Darcy, and  I haven’t found him yet. But I know he exists.”

Oh no he bloody doesn’t, darling.

The truth is that British men should indeed be celebrated, but not for our worldliness or charm or intelligence. Rather we should be applauded for pulling off the most brilliant PR coup the world has ever seen. We have taken a seriously flawed product – we’re pudgy, socially awkward, bumbling, dorky and we drink far too much – and we’ve convinced American chicks that these are actually selling points.

The roots of the great British lie can be traced back to Jane Austen. As Kelly put it: “American women learn about British men from Pride and Prejudice, so instead of thinking that Darcy is an uncommunicative dolt, we think he’s just being British.” Another of my exes, who threatened to kill me if I mentioned her name, supported the theory: “for the first month of our relationship when you showed up at my house drunk at 2am, I just assumed it was a ‘British thing’” Likewise when Hugh Grant was caught with a hooker on Sunset Boulevard and went on American TV to apologise. British women would have laughed him off the screen, but over here he just had to act bumble-y and bashful and – “my goodness, crikey, I’m so frightfully silly” – all was forgiven. He wasn’t out whoring and cheating on his girlfriend; he was just being British. It’s like the apocryphal story about PT Barnum selling a truck-load of white salmon by boasting that it was “guaranteed never to turn pink in the can”. British men have pulled the same trick with American women: “guaranteed never to turn mature in a relationship”.

Of course, you probably think I’m taking a huge gamble admitting to all of this. What if an American girl sees it and tells her friends? Hundreds of years of cunning ruined in 700 words. But therein lies the brilliance of the scam: if you’re a Brit-loving American girl and you’re reading this, I guarantee I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “oh, how wonderfully self-deprecating of him!. How typically British! And I bet with his accent it sounds even more charming.” And – you know what – you may be right. Or you might not. Really there’s only one way to find out.

Call me.