During 2002, I fell in love with a tall, slender jazz drummer. Charming, elegant and what we once called well brought up, Jeff had an off-beat sense of humour that cracked me up.
His passion for analysing what makes people tick dovetailed with my nosy inclinations as a novelist, and we could talk for hours.
Older but wiser: Author Lionel Shriver says of herself and husband Jeff: 'In emotional terms, we're in full bloom'
A professional percussionist, he had impeccable timing: Arriving romantically in my life just before I was fated to disintegrate into grumpy decrepitude.
Jeff was already 52. In cinematic terms, we were old. At 45, I was the age at which actresses complain they can no longer get parts. I'd known Jeff for years.
He'd been married to my literary agent. (Don't let that filthy mind race ahead of you - I didn't even notice that the man was, well, rather beguiling until he'd been divorced from his ex for two years and she was no longer my agent.)
So I dusted off this old friend and burnished him up into my beloved. Much as you can sometimes polish up a serviceable candle-holder from all that broken junk stashed in the attic, you can occasionally salvage an undiscovered treasure from the motley mishmash of many decades of acquaintances.
I doubt we'd been seeing each other for more than three weeks when I accompanied him to a drum shop.
We were holding hands when Jeff stopped on the pavement with an air of having just remembered that he'd meant to buy a new head for his snare.
But he had in mind a different sort of snare. Calmly, head at an inquisitive tilt, he announced: 'I would like you to be my wife.'
'Yes, I would like that, too,' I acceded lightly, again in that pleasantly ordinary spirit of: 'Why, sea bass would be just the ticket for dinner.' I remember we were both a touch wondrous for a moment, but then we took each other's hands again and talked amiably about something else.
'Funny, it's supposedly when you're young that you're rash. But I've become far more spontaneous in middle age. Because there's no time to lose.
If Jeff and I were ever to be husband and wife, these crusty old coots had better seal the deal pronto. So we tied the knot with a ten-minute, $50 Las Vegas 'I do' generally reserved for couples who are drunk or pregnant.
Typically for their generation, my parents met and married in their early 20s. In some respects, I'm envious of their longevity; they've been together for 56 years. To duplicate that scale of commitment, Jeff and I will have to live decades beyond our life expectancy.
Yet there are advantages to finding your match late in the day. You trade duration for variation.
SECOND CHANCE
Over the past ten years, divorces among the over 50s have risen by 20 per cent in Britain, according to official figures
Throughout a rich romantic history, I've effectively led whole different lives. I cherish my memories of most previous boyfriends (with a few nightmare exceptions), especially my last one. Not enduring for ever doesn't make a relationship meaningless or disappointing, and I would not have spent a minute of those nine years with my former partner any other way.
To my dismay, however, having a past generally means that your spouse has a past, too. I tell myself that had Jeff made it to 52 without any serious romantic entanglements there would have been something wrong with him.
Yet when he tells me about numerous other women in his life I still get jealous. That said, it's a delicious jealousy, and a form of entertainment. After all, this handsome, hilarious, talented man slipped through all those other women's fingers, and I can feel smug about being the only one who's landed him for keeps.
Much is often made of how older people get set in their ways, so that couples who meet in middle age have trouble making the compromises that keep a marriage afloat. If we haven't suffered many dug-in face- offs, that's largely to Jeff's credit.
I live in London; he moved to London. I eat at midnight; we eat at midnight. I do Calisthenics in the living room early evenings, which means 8pm, I control the television and, no, Jeff may not watch Top Gear.
I'm embarrassed to realise that most of the compromise has been one-way. I know I'm wilful. An unabashed feminist, I'm allergic to the idea of shaping my life around a man's.
Latre-life marriage: Lionel is confident that she and Jeff will go the distance
So I found the perfect husband for me: not some mashed potatoes pushover, but a man who's flexible, and who loves me so dearly that he will even shift continents to make me happy.
Jeff 's vaunted flexibility has limits. So I may be exasperated by his insistence on organising his belongings in equidistant piles on the floor.
I may weary of his ubiquitous plastic toothpicks poking from all the crevices of our furniture. I may get bored to the point of insanity by his numbing repetition of 'Come on, man!' and 'What are we doin'?' When we fly together, I may be maddened to find myself in the airport five hours early.
But I've given up trying to allay his quirky, obsessive anxieties (ovens any hotter than
300 degrees create moisture on the kitchen ceiling) because the man is almost 60.
This is particularly difficult for women to accept: he's not going to change. At least by your 50s, what you see is what you get. Pardon the tautology, but Jeff is Jeff. I knew the kind of man I was marrying, and he's not likely at this point to go through some horrifying transformation and become a born-again Christian or conclude that he's gay.
The odd career blow, maybe; illness, probably. But as for my husband's true nature, I'm unlikely to be hit by unpleasant surprises. In fact, Jeff and I may be wilting physically, but in professional and emotional terms, we're in full bloom.
Of course, there are more substantial downsides to late-life marriage. The most glaring is children. No post-menopausal wife is going to have any.
'To my dismay, however, having a past generally means that your spouse has a past, too'
In our case, falling in love during my reproductive twilight was fine; neither of us ever wanted a family.
But for a woman with maternal aspirations, finally meeting the ideal father for her children when she's too old to have them must be dispiriting, like at last lighting upon the perfect fabric for the curtains when the upholstery you were hoping to match is all worn out.
Jeff and I have also been spared the other commonplace source of conflict in the child department: children from a previous relationship. I'm a big admirer of late-life spouses who manage that delicate balance of embracing often grown-up step-children while never trying to take the place of the real parent.
I do feel deprived by having missed out of so much of Jeff's life. I never saw him play with Stan Getz or Joe Lovano; I wasn't in the audience during his heyday with the groundbreaking Lookout Farm.
I'm outraged that through most of his killingly winsome youth, the moron wore a beard so I don't even have proper pictures of his younger face.
We have to content ourselves with each others' ageing bodies, and live with the fact that we squandered the smooth, taut, resilient versions on other people. Nonetheless, I forgive his thinning hair. From my lifetime of scowling, Jeff is obliged to forgive a forehead that doubles as a Tube advert for Botox.
There's something tender about this process of mutual absolution, gracious and generous, and, gradually, my attraction to my husband blends what he looks like now with the dashing, willowy man I remember.
Marrying late, you simply don't have that much time together. A future of frailty and infirmity may await most folks eventually, but for us that degeneration is right round the corner.
I'm fearful of Jeff 's death. he's seven years my senior. He's a man. Like so many jazz musicians, he smokes. Actuarially, I'm likely to survive him by 20 years.
So I live under the shadow of a lonely future that grows ever more vivid: talking to myself all day; crushing giant spiders in the kitchen myself and disposing of dead mice; no longer enjoying a 6ft human extension ladder to get the bread box down from the top of the refrigerator and having to fetch a chair; eating small, carelessly prepared dinners in front of the TV; throwing away piles of rotting vegetables because I can't get used to the fact that I've no one else to cook for.
Yet this terror pushes me to appreciate Jeff is still here. Indeed, whenever he despoils dinner with hand-wringing about a pinprick brown mottle on the ceiling (moisture), I light into a now familiar refrain: 'You don't understand! Sod the ceiling! We don't have that much time left!'
People live so long these days that it's bloody difficult to marry in your 20s and still make good on till death do us part.
Congrats to the likes of my parents for defying this suspicion, but I wonder if most people are constitutionally capable of staying with the same partner for 60, even 70, years over which you go through so many changes of circumstances and heart.
The chances of Jeff and I going the distance are considerably higher because there's far less distance to go.( dailymail.co.uk )
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