I used to feel that I knew a lot of nice young men. Most of those I trained with at college were lovely blokes. None of us are in touch any more but I would bet most of them got married shortly after they found their feet in the workplace. Of those who did so, I would also bet that most of them are still married to the lass they chose or were chosen by. But the older I get the more I wonder: where have all the nice young men gone?

That isn’t a yearning plea for lost youth and missed opportunities. I’m married too and I still consider my husband to be amongst those who are nice, and am glad that he manages to remain so despite much provocation on my part. He regularly updates his mocking-stock of self-adulatory phrases from ads on TV. While his basic “loveliness is Me-shaped” continues to be trotted out just as regularly as it has been ever since we wed, he has recently decided to be both a L’Oreal male (“because I’m worth it”), and a human Jaguar (“gorgeous is effortless”). Age, he tells me, has only added to his personal distinction. By contrast he disparages my figure in robust terms, except under certain conditions that I’m not silly enough to discuss in public. When I tell him firmly to shut up and get on with peeling the sprouts he just grins. And I grin back. I can retreat from his DIY work and sit alone at the computer typing for hours on end, or I can read and steal fruit and nuts from his weekly selection while he watches football; with a liberal use of the phrase, “Yes, dear,” he and I seem to rub along just fine. We have done so for over 30 years – give or take a year off for bad behaviour.

However, during that give or take period, Graham and I actually got divorced before deciding that we really were better suited to each other than to anyone else. I did quite a lot of personal research at the time into the state of the middle-aged and supposedly nice guy. There were reasonable numbers of them about if you knew which stones to turn over. Mainly they were recovering divorcés, with one or two married shits deservedly on the way to that state. Some were ordinary and quite nice looking, most were ordinary and nothing to write home about. One or two were truly lovely men whose disappearance on my remarriage still makes me vaguely sad. They knew they were not handsome, but they were kind and helpful, funny and self-deprecating, and genuinely good to be with. I would not embarrass them now by trying to get back in touch nor by putting their names in print here, because I hope that each has found someone good to share that funniness and kindness. Whoever she is, they certainly deserve her and she doesn’t need to know anything about me, but consider yourselves thanked, boys, for being friends; for being nice.

I hear you asking, gentle reader: “why are you fretting about the state of the gender Male, if you have been happily married for so long?” Well, Graham and I have a daughter, and all the men she tells me about seem to have suffered a personality arrest somewhere in late adolescence. The thirty-somethings of her acquaintance are by turns feckless, selfish, possessive, immature, self-pitying, controlling, violent, or criminal. The only adolescent self-indulgences they don’t seem to display are alcohol or drugs.

It might seem reasonable to put Jen’s attraction of dead-heads down to some failure on our part. It’s always a parent’s fault. Did I omit to point out her father’s sterling qualities to her? or did she perhaps became deaf from an overdose of his mocking self-praise?  But there's plenty of evidence that Jen’s girl friends have also been coupled to dreadful men, who crave a woman barely out of her teens who preferably has no ideas of her own. They treat children, if the girls have them, as trophy possessions, and the responsibility of partnership appears to be entirely foreign to them. When I listen to the tales the girls tell and through them see the posturings of the young males, I am irresistibly reminded of Attenborough’s nature programmes, detailing the behaviour of a tribe of macaques or chimpazees. Maybe it’s something in the water round here. It’s a shame they weren’t bred near enough to the nuclear reprocessing plant to have grown up with two heads, as a visible statement of their peculiarities.

Yet, I know from my personal research that older and middle aged men can be nice guys. Among the younger boys whom I observe at the University, whether they struggle or sail through their studies, the nice do outnumber the awful by about four to one.  So why is my daughter’s generation having such a hard time, the ones who should be in the best part of their lives, enjoying relationships and raising a family? The mothers of my own age, like centuries of Cumbrian women before them, did a good job in educating their daughters to be strong and independent women. However, somewhere along the line they must have forgotten to pass on self-assurance to their sons; because it seems to me it must be inadequacy that prevents young men being nice these days.

Perhaps my husband, in his retirement, should open a charm school for them.