Make sure he's a toyboy

I met my husband when he was 26 and I was 37 and a half. I didn't tell him that, of course. He assumed I was younger, mainly because, well, we all look younger these days, don't we?

I still wore baggy combats, midriff-skimming vests, and trainers - they might have been £400 ones from Hermes, but they were still trainers. I listened to hip hop.

I had my roots expensively touched up every four weeks, had been very careful to moisturise and keep my skin out of daylight; I ran most days in the gym and went to Pilates classes, didn't drink or smoke or do any of those other nasty things that make your body begin to pucker like a prune.

It all sounds like terribly hard work, and believe me, it was - keeping up this pretence of being fresh and moist. You might think it would have been a heck of a lot easier to date someone my own age, but who would want to? A tired old man in a suit with old lady arms? Who probably had children and an ex and slippers? No thanks. Plus, if I'm honest, men my age didn't seem that interested.

Having been single until my late thirties, I was set in my ways, what with my ferocious cats and telly nights and over-protective friends; I think men my age were afraid they were going to be bossed about and preferred 24-year-olds who couldn't drive/didn't have a mortgage/thought their jokes were funny.

So it comes as no surprise that new statistics show almost one in four women marry younger men. Here are some of the main advantages ...

Men in their twenties have a different attitude to women than men of my generation. My husband was brought up in an age when it's okay for men to be in touch with their feelings. He cooks. He exfoliates. He recycles. He cried during Seabiscuit.

He isn't afraid of me being in charge or paying for things in restaurants. Anyway, we didn't get together because we thought it was fashionable or because Madonna or Demi Moore did it; he was the person I happened to fall in love with.

That older women are nabbing all the boys must be very annoying for single women in their twenties, so I asked my husband why he picked me and not some nubile 24-year-old whose eggs were still ripe, and he shrugged and said: "You were sorted, you didn't have any hang-ups, you weren't all gauche. Isn't it like that scene from The Graduate - I knew I could learn something from you. Plus the fact you didn't want anything from me was great too."

Sometimes, though, when we go out, and he is in a hooded sweatshirt with jeans that have a crotch somewhere around his knees, I do feel as if he is my wayward teenage son called Kevin.

Sometimes he sits in his room in a mood with loud house music on (to me, it just sounds like a racket; it must be my age) and won't come out. He also watches back-to-back Simpsons episodes when I want to watch Location, Location, Location. He leaves his washing on the floor. He wants to go to Ibiza this summer to rave for two weeks; I think a nice quiet villa in Tuscany would be far more apt.

And, yes, of course there is conflict, and I do worry about the future; he may joke about me breaking a hip (he recently bought me vegetarian omega oils so that I "don't seize up entirely, like a board"), but I know he isn't looking forward to having a 50-year-old wife. (I only came clean about my real age two weeks before the wedding. He took it really well, all said and done; although he pranged our new car because he was in shock, and secretly checked my passport in case I was really 57).

When we first got married he said he didn't want children, being far too young and encumbered with a student loan to even think about fatherhood, but over the past couple of years we have decided we do. He has read all the statistics about the probability of me getting pregnant and so we have decided to adopt - far less selfish than IVF and at least I don't have to go through childbirth; I'm sure it would prove very ageing indeed: all that weight gain and straining can't be good.

Anyway, I've talked endlessly about all this with my mum and she thinks we're very lucky. "At least," she says, "unlike me you won't have to spend your final decade without the love of your life." Fingers crossed.