That's men for you: Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health
Once upon a time, older women used to go around wearing headscarves and shapeless raincoats as they staggered home with bags of shopping or made their way to the church to say their prayers.
Now all that has changed. The traditional older woman has either disappeared or is fast on the way out.
US research shows that your older woman, far from saying her prayers, is working out at the gym and dating younger guys. According to the research, done for the American Association of Retired Persons, just over 30 per cent of unmarried women in their 40s, 50s and 60s are in relationships with younger men.
The trend is exemplified by celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Emma Thompson, Madonna, Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn. All hitched up with younger men till divorce do them part.
But real people do it too. Closer to home, an analysis of marriage statistics over three and a half decades in Britain showed that the proportion of brides marrying men younger than themselves almost doubled to 26 per cent in 1963-1998.
Now, we're not talking about cradle-robbers here. In most cases, the man was less than six years younger than the woman.
Still, we're seeing a change in society in which the traditional expectation that the man will be at least a year or two older than his bride is fast becoming irrelevant.
No doubt, the trend is also occurring in Ireland, as is the phenomenon of women in their 40s and upwards dating younger men. Indeed, there is a weekly disco in a Dublin hotel which I have been told is called "grab a granny night".
But if glamorous grannies are out boogying the night away with young Adonises (all right, a slight exaggeration but you'd be surprised what enough vodka and coke can do to the perception), where are the older men?
I am afraid that one of the problems the older man faces, according to the gloriously named Dr Pepper Schwartz (a sociologist at the University of Washington, and something of an expert on anything and everything to do with sexuality, relationships and all that) is that he lets himself go.
By letting himself go, she doesn't mean he puts flowers in his hair and cavorts around a campfire at night chanting Om. She means not paying attention to his appearance, becoming a couch potato, looking like he was dragged through a hedge backwards, that sort of thing.
After all that working out and attention to their appearance, she explains, older women are more likely to be attracted to younger men who have kept themselves trim.
Traditionally it used to be said that women let themselves go when they reached a certain age. No more. All has changed utterly. Look at all those tens of thousands of women running or walking in the women's mini-marathon the other day. That's what we're up against, lads, as we cling to our cans of lager and sink deeper into the couch.
Any older man hoping to attract one of these older women for himself will have to go to work: get down to the gym, start pounding the pavements in his jogging gear, replace his pint with a still water and his fry with a bowl of muesli - and maybe get himself down to Colour Me Beautiful to get his dress sense sorted out.
The older women/younger men thing arrived in the consciousness of some of us in the 1960s when Mrs Robinson sent pulses racing among men in the audiences for The Graduate.
The most recent cinematic outing for this sort of thing was, I think, the 2003 movie The Mother in which a not terribly glamorous granny has a fling with her daughter's boyfriend. Crikey, it's a long way from daily mass-going isn't it?
By the way, if you're a younger woman, you needn't be smirking at us guys. If you happen to have a boyfriend about whom you're crazy and if you're the jealous type, just remember it's not your girlfriends you need to worry about. It's their mothers.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.