Me and my kept man ...

A recent survey says younger men are more than happy to be kept by their women.

One in 10 men have a partner who is the main or only breadwinner. More than two-thirds of 24 to 35-year-old men say their goal is a stress-free life. Only half of those who are kept admit to twinges of guilt - but say they're not enough to make them abandon a life of leisure. Almost half said the fact that they earned much less than their partners made no difference to whether they felt like a "real man". But how do their partners feel about the situation?

I passed these statistics on to my boyfriend who, as usual at 11am, was reading the back pages of the paper in his dressing gown. We have lived together for two years; during that time he has earned precisely £300. He says that he has given me moral support during my times of crisis, nurtured me, and supervised the cats during my long hours at work or travelling on business.

All of which is true, and priceless, and I did encourage him to leave a good job at the BBC to pursue his dream of writing a novel. But when I am trying to meet a deadline in my office downstairs and he fails for the umpteenth time to answer the phone because he is "meditating", my patience begins to wear thin.

The other day, during a heated debate about the fact that he hadn't changed the cat litter, his defence for doing so little work - even that prefixed with the word "house" - went along the lines of, "But I am only 28." I told him that when I was 28 I had a mortgage and two jobs. At 6pm I would cycle from my day job on a glossy magazine to the news desk of a paper, getting to bed at about 4am. I catch him malingering by feeling the bed for warmth when I get home from yet another mammoth shop in Sainsbury's (he says the indentation is the cat. I tell him even she isn't that big). The PlayStation2 has now been confiscated. During the First World War, he would have been shot.

My boyfriend is not alone in his refusal to climb the corporate ladder, or just get the stepladder out and change a light bulb. I have six close friends who all financially support their boyfriends. One rang me the other day to say that her boyfriend had asked her if she wanted the good news or the bad news. The bad news was that he had only earned £7,000 last year; the good news was that he wouldn't have to pay much tax. The really annoying thing about boyfriends and husbands who live off their partners is that they don't realise the true cost of groceries or digital television. My boyfriend frequently tells me that he is "anti-consumerist", that two can live as cheaply as one. Women all know that men, even small ones, eat twice as much as we do.

When I was single and wanted to save up for a pair of Burberry knee-length boots, I lived on muesli for weeks and stayed in watching Friends. But, with a boyfriend in the picture, there is always the requirement to have proper meals, things that involve cooking, followed by pudding. They always seem to want biscuits. I tell him that, for the price of a boyfriend, I could easily have a really large child, or a horse. He just grins enigmatically and pulls open another pillow of lamb's lettuce which he drowns in olive oil that costs £14.99 a bottle.

He thinks I am exaggerating when I say we have to economise. He asks me why I spend £400 on having my hair done at Aveda when I come home looking exactly the same. I tell him that the £400 included products, and that as I don't drink or smoke or eat meat or fish, I can live cheaply. I tell him that I haven't drunk tap water since 1979, that I have never bought own-brand shampoos or things that come in granules, and I'm not about to start now. You can perhaps begin to see why there is a little bit of a conflict. But the boyfriend hit the nail on the head when he said that I wouldn't want to go out with a man who wears a suit, works in an office and carries a briefcase.

A lot of my friends live with struggling writers, musicians, actors, sculptors or photographers, and none of them would swap them for a man whose mobile was anything other than pay-as-you-go. They are all career women, and admit they love having a "wife" to come home to at the end of a long day, albeit one who doesn't do any ironing or bear children. My boyfriend has finally dispatched his manuscript to an agent. I think it's a masterpiece. All being well, I am looking forward to being the kept woman. At last!