I knew I was in love when I found myself watching Love Actually on Box Office last month. Watching Love Actually with a videotape in the machine, the controller in my hand and hate in my heart, for hours, just so I could capture for my boyfriend the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it love story of Martin Freeman and Joanna Page as the shy porn stand-ins — because I knew he’d like it but he’d never be such a sap as to watch the whole thing. Greater love hath no broad than to sit through a Richard Curtis film just for the Martin Freeman bits, to spare her man the rest of it.

I knew I was in love when I realised that for the past nine years I have never, ever made random phone calls to exes or crushes when drunk, as unfortunately I was very prone to do throughout my first two marriages. Though of course, I still encourage my closest friends to do so, so I can listen — come on, it’s a hard habit to break.

I knew I was in love when I realised that in the course of nine years, we’ve only ever rowed about proper things. I’ve lost count of the times we’ve argued from dusk till dawn about Middle Eastern politics (I am fanatically proIsrael; my husband sees “both sides”, the bastard) and domestic religion (I am furiously Protestant; my husband, though allegedly God-fearing, finds all organised religion equally dubious, the swine), but I am extremely pleased that we’ve never once done that vile he-said-she-said thing about who flirted with whom, that thing that seems so harmless yet adds up to so much damage.

I knew I was in love because nine years feel like nine weeks; because getting married last week didn’t feel like the beginning of the end, as it often can, but rather the end of the beginning.

Nevertheless, though by no means a needlessly modest person, I was surprised by the media interest in this union, culminating in a double page in the Daily Mail — a piece, by the way, so irreproachably accurate that it had me regularly carousing with a best friend who has been dead for three years, has my husband and me taking daily strolls around a park we have not visited for half a decade and, most preposterously of all, has my sister-in-law — a woman of quite scarily impeccable taste — married to a man rejoicing in the name of “Ian”. As if!

My recent marriage was described as bizarre, provocative and sensational, and myself as a “publicity junkie” — albeit one whose only comment was: “Thank you so much for your interest, but this is a private wedding.” Now I know that there are many reasons why one should ignore the Daily Hell during one of its frequent fits of overexcited hypermorality — because its whole frustrated feeding frenzy is inspired by the awful suspicion that somewhere out there, there is a woman doing what she wants — and getting away with it! But never let it be said that I missed out on an opportunity to bitch-slap a rival, and if I have to swank and boast during the process — bizarrely, provocatively and sensationally, even — then so be it.

Like an increasing number of women — now one in four — I have married a man younger than myself — 13 years younger, in fact. According to the sex doctor in the other section recently, a man looks ideally for a woman half his own age plus nine years — so in theory my husband should have gone for a 25-year-old, a 40-year-old man for a woman of 29, and a 50-year-old man for a broad of 34. We are also frequently informed that a vast “epidemic” of loss of sexual desire is abroad among women. Without wishing to crow, could this have anything to do with the fact that three out of four of them still marry old male mingers? Show me an old broad married to a young man, though, and I’ll show you someone who never gets a headache.

A young man who goes for an old broad looks confident, unconventional and studly; a young girl who goes for old men — well, let me count the ways she looks weird. She looks like some sort of prostitute (though her market of choice is the Sunday papers rather than the massage parlour), she looks as if she wants to do the dirty with dear old dad (some men rape their daughters — few women rape their sons, which is why the reverse doesn’t look so creepy), she looks like she has been dumb enough to have been treated badly by a succession of young men (“Better an old man’s darling than a young man’s fool”) or she looks as if she doesn’t like sex much, and feels secure that with an old geezer she can get away with a couple of measly times a week. There’s the rub, you see: whereas young-woman-older-man combos are basically about the desire for “security”, financial or otherwise, on her part, a young-man-older-woman arrangement is first and foremost about the desire for sex, loads of it, on his part.

The difference in the two set-ups draws merciless attention to the differing sexual abilities of ageing men and women. Thus every time a mature woman picks a younger man over her peers, she hits the raddled roué where he lives — right in the crotch, to be crude. When I consider the humiliating lengths I went through during my first marriage just to “get off” sex (I used to wish my mother could write me a note, as she did when I didn’ t fancy double PE: “Please excuse Julie sex, as she is bilious”), I can hardly believe I’m the same person.

Of course, some sad dad-suckers will maintain that old men know what to “do” with “it” — but will you know what to do with them when they turn blue? One very funny letter I received on this subject, and perhaps I shouldn’t mock but she started it, was from an indignant young woman who said that she had had the best sex of her life with her ex-boyfriend, who was some 20 years older than her. The reason that he was her ex, it transpired, was that he had died on the job. Excuse me, but wouldn’t one vital condition of having the “best” sex you’ve ever had be to be “still alive after it”?

Scientists can chunder on all they like about a man’s need to spread his seed, and how the younger woman facilitates this, but things have changed. Men do not want children half as much as women wish they did — hence the preference of alpha males for fellatio, and the notorious court cases in which rich or famous men attempt to prove that they are not the fathers of certain children. These days sexual incontinence in a man tends to be confined to the sink-estate no-hoper who has fathered three children before he is old enough to vote.

Ironically, the very reason why women marry older men — to feel “secure” — is the part of the deal almost certain to be broken. Men die considerably earlier than women anyway, even if you marry one of the same age as yourself; marry an older one, and you’re practically planning to be a widow. You won’t feel secure at the time when you most need it — you’ll feel like a lonely old widow, of the kind who you now feel so sorry for when you see them all around you. And for years before he dies, he’ll probably be impotent, and he’ll probably blame you, so it’s likely you won’t even have that many happy memories to cling to. “I only feel protected with a younger man,” said the gorgeous Amanda Redman recently, and it really makes sense.

Slice it how you like: older women, who are past craving babies and domestic drear, keep young men young; younger women, the lovelier they are, make old men look even older and more gullible than they do already. Just look at Cameron and Justin, Demi and Ashton — then look at A Blonde and Stringfellow. The first says playmates — the second says freaks. Maybe it’s payback for all those years when men could date as young as they liked, but a woman going out with a man three years younger was seen as a cradle-snatcher — whatever, the power has shifted. I can personally avow that while I’ve always had a fair amount of sex, fun and sheer molten joy, I’ve had nothing compared with what I have had over the past nine years of my wicked old life, thanks to my allegedly unsuitably young husband.

“The good ended happily and the bad unhappily — that is what we call fiction,” says a clever person from a book I can’t recall the name of. But should this cease to be the case, I’m sure you’ll read about it first in the Daily Mail. And so long as they don’t have me running off with a man called “Ian”, they can say what they like.

julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk