This week I’ve read newspaper stories concerning a 71-year-old man, married to a 25-year-old woman, who has just become Britain’s oldest father of twins; a 112-year-old Somali man who is marrying a 17-year-old girl; and the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, 42, who just got engaged to her 19-year-old boyfriend.

I like to chew over news stories with friends but big age differences in relationships, as a conversation topic, rarely bring out the best in people. For example, the women over 30 I know — even the most laid-back or postmodern ones — tend to get disproportionately vicious when discussing a relationship between an older man and a younger woman.

I have first-hand experience of this. I was away filming in 1997 — I was 40 — and was sitting in a bar one evening with the production team, when I mentioned my then girlfriend. One of the two women on the team, both of whom were over 30, asked me what my girlfriend did for a living.

When I said “She’s a student”, dark clouds seemed to gather. “What, so she went back into education, did she?” one of the women asked. I decided to head straight for the eye of the storm.

“She’s 20,” I said. If I’d added “and I occasionally punch her in the face”, I don’t think it could have made the atmosphere much worse. It was an off-duty event and I wasn’t expecting star treatment but the ensuing debate got really quite aggressive. “What can you possibly find to talk to her about?” I was asked.

Although both these women were bright and interesting, my 20-year-old girlfriend was, in truth, brighter and more interesting but it seemed unwise to use this as a “for instance”. Instead, I just said that I picked my partners on criteria other than age. “Oh, I bet you do!” said one of the women. Up to that point, the three of us had got on famously but, post-revelation, I was clearly now in the same condemned cell as Woody Allen.

A few years later I was watching the nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow on a daytime TV show, talking about his teenage fiancée. He got asked the same “What do you find to talk about?” question by an irate female member of the audience but he replied: “Oh, well, you see, I’m lucky because I’m quite shallow.”

I looked hard for irony but found none. He went on to explain that he didn’t require much from conversation, so rarely felt short-changed. The crowd was silenced.

The dismissal of all relationships with a considerable age difference as intrinsically dysfunctional is so common, so unquestioned, that any dissent smells suspiciously of hidden agenda. Maybe I should say that my relationship with the 20-year-old ended, as have my relationships with many women of varying ages, and that now, aged 52, I live with a 39-year-old woman who I’m crazy about. I know that’s still a 13-year difference but no one seems to get angry about it. I’m told the accepted formula for a successful relationship is that the woman should be half the man’s age plus seven years. My female friends definitely approve of the fact that I’m not claiming my full allowance.

The Sam Taylor-Wood debate among my lady mates was much less predictable. Where I expected “Go, girl!”, I got: “Well, she’ll probably have two or three years of fun before he clears off.”

Cougars — women who date much younger men — tend to get a patronising smile rather than the cold hostility reserved for men who date much younger women. Why do so many women get angry about the latter? I’m not talking gobby fishwife-types who rattle off anti-men clichés between each draw on their high-tar cigarettes. I’m talking caring, intelligent, successful women, often in happy relationships of their own. I don’t believe it’s as simple as fear of their own ageing, or some sort of inter-age-group rivalry — “they come over here, stealing our men”.

I’m concentrating on female responses I had to this subject because they were so extreme. Male friends were either just dismissive or lapsed into laddishness. The worst reaction I ever had to my 20-year-old girlfriend was a male friend taking me to one side at a party and giving me an enthusiastic congratulatory handshake. The horror!

There are communication problems caused by the age-gap — when I dated a younger woman I tended not to discuss anything that happened before the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — but every relationship involves unshared areas of the mind. There are, I’ll admit, difficult moments. It was slightly wince-making when I relaxed with a post-coital cigarette and she did revision. And it was awkward when her parents — I felt deliberately — encouraged me to share, in front of her, reminiscences about decimalisation. But all relationships are difficult and both partners being the same age is hardly a guarantee of success.

It worries me that anti-age-gap prejudice assumes youth and beauty to be intrinsically more valuable than experience and its hopefully resulting wisdom, and thus the younger partner is always somehow perceived as getting the spiky end of the pineapple. Is the physical — the obvious — always the greater prize? We’ve accrued enough common sense and compassion to accept interracial relationships and, more recently, civil partnerships; maybe it’s time to broaden our minds a little farther and accept that love should always have our respect, even if we think its participants ill matched in years.

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