Wednesday evening and I’m at an open-air food festival in London with my friend Ed. The moment he goes back to the bar for drinks, a pockmarked chap standing near me swings round like a hinge.

‘What’s your name?’ he hisses, not wanting to waste time with imaginative lines. ‘Don’t tell me. I already know it: it’s Beautiful,’ he leers, above a plate of cuttlefish and squid which has stained his teeth black.

‘It’s actually Bella,’ I deadpan but, not knowing Italian, he doesn’t quite get it. Instead he calls me ‘Bella’ for half an hour, while Ed, who’s finally returned with drinks in hand, revels in the horror of it all.

My new friend — let’s call him Squid Ink — must be in his mid-50s, although he tells me he’s 30. He’s in property, he says.

Lucy Holden, 28, (pictured) claims older men constantly approach her and other millennial women. She revealed how midlife men use online dating apps to speak to younger women

In fact, there’s a whole group of them here, all connected to one restaurant in some way, and all in suits, with pocket squares and brogues. They swoop about the stall taking turns to chat up the women in its vicinity, who are mainly glamorous PRs a third their age. Despite wedding rings glimmering on most of their left hands, their eyes go up and down our dresses like lifts.

‘What just happened?’ Ed asks once we escape. I shrug. This isn’t exactly a one-off. I’m 28 and I get chatted-up by men almost double my age all the time, as do my friends — and there are statistics to prove it.

The online dating site OkCupid found that while women looked for partners roughly the same age, men — regardless of how old they were — preferred 20 to 22-year-old girls. This makes me cringe, but it doesn’t surprise me, especially when it comes to online dating.

Older men have always chased younger women, with some studies even arguing it’s an evolutionary imperative. Now websites and apps such as Tinder have exacerbated it by making the approach all the easier.

In tandem, the explosion of online dating seems to have given men of a certain age the nerve to approach women decades younger offline as well.

But the virtual world is the midlife man’s favoured hunting ground. If you’re 50-odd and want to chat up a twenty-something, you risk them laughing in your face if you walk up to them in a bar. Online, you don’t even know when you’ve been rejected.

After setting your age preferences to anything between 18 and 55-plus, you simply scroll through images of potential ‘matches’ on your phone screen, swiping right for ‘yes, please’, and left for ‘not in a million years’.

In short, you can be as ambitious (or deluded) as you choose, without any risk of having a drink thrown over you. Dating apps are so user-friendly and people ‘swipe’ in such volume that they only really notice the matches, not the lack of them.

So a 49-year-old promoter named Earl, who’s undone one too many buttons on his shirt, and has a chunky gold necklace nestling in the chest hair below his overly fake-tanned face, never needs to know I’ve saved his picture and sent it to a friend accompanied by an emoji of a sick face.

Lucy Holden (pictured right) claims men who lie about their age online can be recognized by how they speak

Likewise, a 56-year-old who looks like Eric Pickles and says he can ‘talk all night after a bottle of Chablis or 17’, doesn’t realise his chat-up line is now used across London by my friends. ‘I bet he could talk all night after a bottle of Chablis or 17,’ we say, if we see someone particularly dreadful-looking in the pub.

Now, it’s something to laugh at. But when I was using Tinder a couple of years ago, it shocked me how many men in their 50s and 60s I was ‘matched’ to (not realising a friend had spread my age preference on the app to 55+ for a joke).

After the shock, I was horrified. I know a few people who have found their fiances on Tinder, but it still has a reputation for being a ‘hook-up’ app. I wondered whether these men actually thought I’d have sex with them. Did they think they were so irresistible I’d overlook the fact they were balder than a sphynx cat and would probably need to spend each afternoon napping?

My friends and I sat incredulously flicking through their profiles, alternately crinkling our faces into grimaces or collapsing into hysterical laughter.

Frank, 49, boasts on his profile: ‘Porsche, yacht, Harley Davidson, horse, champagne.’ Is this some kind of game show?

But how I wish they could hold on to the dignity of their years with a little more success. Take the men who lie about their age — and there are plenty of them. Some lop off a decade to cheat the dating app’s filter and pursue women who’ve set their age limits years lower, before confessing in the blurb with a sheepish ‘48, not 38’.

But for those who don’t confess, well, you can tell the second they start to message you. Simply put, old men use tech in a completely different way to millennials like me, who have been glued to phones since we were 12.

They use emojis thinking it makes them look ‘down with the kids’, but always pick the suggestive ones. Conversations are so full of winking faces, you begin to you wonder if they’ve got a twitch in real life.

They also take ages to type, so by the time you’ve waited for a message back, you’re bored and have moved on.

And, yes, selfies are awful, but badly taken selfies are even worse and older men have no idea how to use a phone’s camera, it seems. Angling it from beneath the chin, they point it straight up their (not always well-kept) nostrils and, because they’re holding it far too close, their pallid faces fill your entire screen.

Others decapitate themselves when uploading topless full-lengths, offering only pale one-packs from the neck down. Past 50, some men advertise that they have their ‘own teeth and hair’ Their eyesight, if they think these are good photos, must be shot.

On top of that, many also post pictures showing millennial daughters who look a bit like you, which is just wrong.

My friends have had similar experiences. Billie, a university friend who’s now 27, sends me a picture of a 56-year-old she’s matched with named Tim, whose profile says he’s bought an ‘old house’ in Bordeaux and would love someone to help him ‘do it up’.

‘Does he mean he’s looking for a decorator?’ she writes. ‘Although I do like Bordeaux,’ she adds, more seriously: ‘Shame we don’t know what he looks like. Must be bad.’

We don’t know what he looks like because his profile picture is a dog sitting on a lawnmower.

Materialistic boasts (or offers of French property) are so constant it’s embarrassing. The profile of 59-year-old Jerry shows only his watch face, presumably because he wants women to see he’s got a £4,000 Panerai Luminor watch.

What age do men prefer to date? 13 per cent of men want to date women their own age Advertisement

Similarly, floppy haired, 49-year-old Frank, whose suavely clipped beard is melting into silver, just lists his possessions: ‘Porsche, yacht, Harley-Davidson, horse, champagne,’ he writes. Do you win them if you sign up to him? Am I on some sort of game show?

It amounts to a tacit confession from the older man that he’s got less to offer than you have: you have youth and looks; he has a face craggier than Snowdonia, but you can look at it from the passenger seat of his Porsche.

That’s way north of gold-digging in my eyes, and while some women are happy to trade their bodies for material goods, I’d be surprised if one half of the transaction doesn’t get very boring, very fast.

There’s a general impression among my friends (a lot of whom see 40 as the cut-off point for dating) that men get more deluded about their pulling power with age. My friend Charlie agrees that apps have made it ‘a thousand times easier for old blokes. When you’re 26 and someone of 50 walks up to you, you think, how arrogant are you? They’re always punching.’

‘Punching’ above their weight is the default strategy of men online. They seem to approach dating in the same way they do a new job or promotion. But instead of going for a better position and bigger wage, they’re looking for younger, more attractive women.

Lucy claims how men and women differ in the workplace is the same as in the dating world. She says men often display arrogance (file image)

Everything we know about how men and women differ in the workplace seems the same in the dating world — women are far more realistic and, if anything, don’t aim high enough, while men often display quite breathtaking arrogance.

‘By a rare stroke of luck I’m now single, so grab me while you can,’ writes Alan, a 52-year-old IT type in prescription sunglasses.

Men seem to rate themselves more highly than women do — which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if they weren’t so unkind, writing off women for getting older or putting on weight when they’ve done exactly the same.

I’ve heard so many middle-aged men say ‘she used to be really attractive’ about ex-partners their own age. Well, hello: so did you!

‘It’s a myth that men get better-looking with age,’ my friend Amy tells me. ‘People only ever say that because of George Clooney.’

It often seems like they have no idea how off-putting they are. Like Rob, 57, who asks if I want to know a ‘fun fact’. I’m convinced that anyone who uses the expression ‘fun fact’ doesn’t possess one, but fine, I say.

‘I’m a grandpa!’ he writes. Dear God. He’s not even trying to seem young. Plus, if he’s 57 and his children have kids, how old must they be? My age?

Lucy believes men may see a younger woman as a way of turning back the clock (file image)

This is one of the most unsettling things about a potential age-gap relationship; their male friends would like you, but the rest of his circle would loathe you.

Much younger girlfriends are always viewed with suspicion — it’s assumed you’re after their money, even if they don’t have any. As for the blokes, they become objects of sneering derision to children and ex-wives, if they exist, while parents, if still alive, keel over in embarrassed horror.

From the frontline it seems like a denial of ageing. While women may embrace the needle or develop a serious Pilates habit, men, it seems, see a younger woman as a way to turn back the clock. Or, at least, to luxuriate in nostalgia.

In almost every conversation I have with an older man who’s hitting on me, I become a reluctant player in a game where they work out what they were doing when I was born. ‘When you were . . . two, I was in my first year of university! When you were seven, I was . . . 30.’

‘When I’m 50, you’ll be 180,’ I now say in return.

Why do men do this? Most fiftysomething women don’t feel the need to chase conquests a third their age. Men seem more desperate to relive their pasts: post-40 they’re obsessed with what they used to be doing, as well as what they used to look like.

Lucy revealed married men have a routine of messaging when they're settled at work but being quiet once home with their family (file image)

One 43-year-old spent New Year’s Eve sending me photos from his student days and from a trip to India before university. His wife was next door with their friends and children, but I didn’t know that then.

I thought, are you looking for validation that you were attractive when you were 18? Or do you need me to tell you you’re more attractive now? It always seems they’re trying to prove more to themselves than to you.

And the lies don’t stop with their ages. While a lot of these men hoping to bag a younger woman are divorced, many are still married.

I’ve learned to pick up the signs. The married message around 11am when they’re settled at work, but stop past 6pm when they’re home with the family.

Occasionally, they’ll log on at the weekend. To all the married midlife women out there: are you sure that important call he disappears to make during Sunday lunch is for work — or is he talking to me? Be eagle-eyed about him taking his phone to the bathroom. Some men have told me they tuck it into their waistbands. Just saying.

They never admit being married, but often claim to be ‘separated’ from middle-aged wives, giving you a sob story about how she ‘wasn’t very nice’. ‘She was so negative’ is a common line, because they associate youth with positivity and age with the opposite.

Lucy hopes to find someone her own age rather than balancing looking after an older man with caring for a baby (file image)

However, lots of what they say paints men in such a bad light it makes me worried about getting married. Someone once told me my stomach was ‘flatter’ than his wife’s (they were supposedly in the process of separating). ‘I guess everything changes when you have children,’ he added. His children, obviously, which is nice.

Often they waft away their marriages as something they didn’t want to do but were ‘persuaded into’ which, if it’s true, only makes them seem incredibly weak.

At that point, you realise you’re a morale boost; proof they’ve still ‘got it’ and could trade their middle-aged other half for a younger model if they wanted.

I’m glad to say they do get caught sometimes. If someone who claims to be separated disappears suddenly from your inbox after talking animatedly for weeks, it usually means his wife has become suspicious of his phone use and he’s deleted the app — or she’s checked his phone and deleted it herself.

The truth is they haven’t thought it through. Even if they are divorced and looking for a girlfriend to start a new life with, do they really want to be visiting me in my flat-share and trailing around clubs after me at 5am?

And would they be happy to have the children I want in five years’ time, when they’re retiring, shattered and ready to take it easy? Can you even carry a baby when you’re blighted by back pain?

Or are they looking for attractive young nurses to care for them in their later years? I’m not sure I’d be able to handle a baby and an old codger at the same time, so which am I going to choose? You guessed it. I’m going to find someone closer to my own age.

I’m still wondering what they could be thinking, if they’re thinking at all, when I find 48-year-old Dan’s profile on Tinder and it all becomes clear.

‘Never (ever) give up on your stupid dreams,’ his profile reads. I think, ah, that’s what’s happening. They’re just dreaming.

All men’s names have been changed to protect identities.