A court in Switzerland has stopped the marriage of a 71-year-old woman to her 21-year-old lover, after the pair met online and bonded over their love of rap music.

The great-grandmother, who has not made her name public, said the young Tunisian man first contacted her on Facebook when he was just 18.

“We both like rap and countryside walks. We have the same ideas,” the Swiss pensioner told national newspaper 20 Minutes.

But a civil registry office in Vaud, west Switzerland, has refused the application, judging it “emotional fraud” intended to gain a visa for the young man.

The retired secretary said she quickly fell in love with her younger beau, and visited him in Tunisia for five days last August.

“We recognised each other straight away. [...] He took me to his house around 250 kilometres from Tunis, where we shared a room. His family sell goats and sheep,” she said.

“He didn’t want me to leave. I didn’t want to come back to Switzerland, either. He calls me ‘my life’. I can’t live without him. I want to marry him.”

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The couple, undeterred by their 50-year age gap, lodged a marriage request with the Swiss ambassador in Tunisia at the end of her visit.

“The age difference is no problem,” said the young man, who works in a shop.

“I introduced her to my family, but not to my friends. My sister gave her a copy of the Quran,” he said. “I don’t want to have children – I love her, and I want to live with her.”

However, the court ruled that the man’s feelings for his fiancé were not genuine.

Swiss law states it is forbidden to marry “in order to circumvent laws on the admission and residence of foreign nationals”.

This is not the first time the pensioner has fallen for a younger man.

“I have been married before, in 1988 with a man from Cameroon who was 13 years my junior,” she said.