Is age just a number?

They say age is just a number and dating is a numbers game.

Linking those two phrases together confuses the hell out of me.

Does that therefore mean ages are important when it comes to dating? Or are they just a part of the fun?

It's said that women mature before their male counterparts so dating an older man makes sense for a lady. But does this then mean she is dumbing down when it comes to dating younger fellas?

It's widely accepted for dirty old men to date hot, young women. Hello Kristy Hinze and Jim Clarke. Hello Hugh Heffner and co.

But it's not as cool for a woman to date a younger man Demi Moore style. The "his and hers" titles of "cougar" and "toy boy" suggest a collective raised eyebrow for the cradle snatching dame while the boys welcome an encouraging pat on the back.

It's rare, though, that we date people the exact same age as us.

Often their birthday falls a few months or years either side of ours. So what I want to know is when does an age gap stray into troubled territory.

What's kind-of-acceptable and what's just downright wrong?

A 2003 study conducted by the American Association of Retired Persons found 34 percent of women surveyed were dating younger men, and 35 percent preferred it to dating older men. Another survey conducted by an online dating site designed for age gap dating found the happiest husbands had wives twelve or more years younger, while the happiest wives were four to ten years older than their husbands. The happiest couples were the ones where the husband was three to five years older.

As long as you can get past the mental image of your new love interest still being in kindergarten when you were busy buying your first house, then go nuts. But it might pay to be prepared for others to be less open minded than you. To throw another cliché into the mix, they say love is blind and perhaps for some that applies to age as well as beauty.

Recently I have found myself attracting younger men when out on the town and while they are generally no more than five years my junior, I still struggle with the notion. In my early twenties I dated a man more than ten years my senior and that was perfectly all right with me.

I did, however, feel more than a hint of disapproval from his female contemporaries. I imagine they saw me depleting their dating pool and now I see why. Although there are oodles of single men under the age of thirty out and about, the more mature man is more likely to spend his weekend hanging out with his friends, their wives and kids than propped up at a bar.

As we get older and our circle of friends pair off, so do everyone else's and so our days of trawling bars looking for love are numbered.

As a good friend of mine says, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Perhaps a younger man is the answer, at least for now anyway. A sort of dating "stop gap" until Mr Right-Over-30 shows up.

Get them young and train them, they say.