SHE may be categorised as a cougar, but Loose Women’s Carol McGiffin insists there is nothing wrong with dating younger men.
The outspoken 62-year-old panellist is often quizzed on her relationship with husband Mark Cassidy, 40, a TV producer, who is 22 years her junior.
And she has no qualms about telling off anyone who judges her over their age gap.
She says: “There are quite a few women in relationships with younger men, but as far as I know, no one goes for a younger man — you just end up meeting them.
“And if they’re younger than you, they’re younger than you, and if I’m older than Mark, then so f***ing what? Sorry.”
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The pair met at a Loose Women wrap party in August 2008, when Carol was 48 and Mark was just 26.
And Carol confesses that in the early days of their relationship, Mark would often be mistaken for her son when they were out together.
She says: “We’d get that. It doesn’t happen very often any more because Mark is 40 now so he’s getting on a bit — so he needs to be traded in.”
The pair have been together 14 years, but Carol admits they often sleep in separate bedrooms.
And she reckons more couples should do the same to get a better night’s kip.
In fact, 51 per cent of Brits agree, saying they choose to sleep separately from their partner.
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“Not every night,” Carol says. “Sometimes I snore a lot. I snore and Mark takes up too much room, so occasionally we would sleep in separate beds.
“If you’ve got the room, I don’t see why not.
“And I think a lot of people do it if they’ve got the room, but they just don’t like to admit it.
“And actually if you want a good night’s sleep, it does help you to have your own bed.”
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The couple will have been married five years next month, having tied the knot in a private ceremony in Bangkok in 2018 after a nine-year engagement.
But don’t expect Carol to walk back down the aisle to renew her vows like celebrities — including TV presenter Rochelle and DJ partner Marvin Humes, actress Martine McCutcheon and husband Jack McManus, and telly hosts Tess Daly and Vernon Kay — have done.
“I don’t know why people do that,” Carol says. “It’s so ridiculous.
“We didn’t really do it properly. For the anniversary, we always go out, but hopefully we are going to be back to the place where we got married, which is Bangkok,
“It will be just us two like it was at our wedding, and no one else there. We never would have done it otherwise.”
Carol now lives in the peace and quiet of south of France.
It’s a far cry from her fast-paced former life in London, when she was married to DJ Chris Evans between 1991 and 1998.
She says: “We live in France, and twice a month I come back for Loose Women.
“It makes me furious that I don’t know how to speak French.
“I’m not fluent, but I can get by.
“We live not far from Cannes, in between Cannes and Nice in a small place in between the mountains, so it’s not all glam.
“It is where everybody wants to live, but if you live there, it’s completely different to going there.”
The couple’s decision to move to France in 2016 was an impulsive one after Mark discovered a property listing online.
Carol says: “I always wanted to live there and Mark is always on Rightmove — always. He’s obsessed with it, and he saw this house and I looked at it, and I thought, ‘Oh my God’, and it was in the south of France.
“So we sold our house, and bought a place there — not the original one.
“It planted the seed.”
The move marked a fresh start for the pair following Carol’s battle with breast cancer in 2014, shortly after she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother.
As part of her treatment, she had a mastectomy, six intensive rounds of chemotherapy and 15 sessions of radiotherapy.
She said previously: “It was absolutely hideous, that kind of chemotherapy.
“There’s lots of different levels as well. It was awful.
“The one I had was properly toxic. It was terrible.
“You kind of realise what your levels are. I could tolerate that. And I could put up with it because I knew what it was doing.
“The treatment makes you feel so sick, it’s hard to believe that it’s actually making you better.
“But it does, apparently. So I just thought, ‘I’ll just get through this’.”
In 2019 Carol marked her five-year remission milestone.
So how is she feeling these days?
“I’m OK,” she says. “You never know, but I feel OK.
“And I keep having the checks and everything else. I think I’m alright.”
But Carol says having cancer hasn’t changed her outlook on life.
She explains: “I always looked at life like I look at it now. Just enjoy every single day and every single minute, and don’t worry about s**t.
“Don’t worry about the stuff that doesn’t matter.”
- Fab Daily spoke to Carol at the Best Heroes Awards in St Ermin’s Hotel, central London.
