Every few months a headline announces that Alison Hammond has “defended” her relationship, as though a defence were the natural response to being happy. The This Morning presenter has a younger boyfriend, and the celebrity press has decided this is a position she must argue rather than a life she gets to live. What is worth looking at is not the couple but the summons — the quiet assumption that her contentment owes the public an account of itself.

Hammond has stopped pretending to be surprised by it. She keeps being asked to explain the man in her life, and she keeps declining, politely, to treat the question as legitimate. “It’s nothing to do with anyone else,” she has said; people will talk, “but that’s their business, not mine.” Delivered flat, without heat, it reads less as a defence than as a refusal to accept the terms of the trial.

The facts underneath are unremarkable, which is part of the point. Her partner, David Putman, is a model and massage therapist; the two met when she booked a treatment, went public a couple of years ago, and now live together in London. The gap between them is 22 years. Hammond has done that arithmetic in public more often than anyone should have to, and she has noticed something the coverage keeps declining to notice alongside her. “I completely understand why people are interested when there’s a 22-year gap,” she said, “but what I find interesting is that it’s not as interesting when it’s the man who is older.”

That sentence is the whole story, and most of the reporting steps over it. An older man beside a much younger woman is a lifestyle; an older woman beside a much younger man is a controversy someone has to break silence on. The asymmetry isn’t hidden inside the coverage — it is the coverage. Hammond isn’t smuggling in a grievance; she is naming the exact mechanism that converts an ordinary relationship into a recurring news item.

Look at the vocabulary and it gives itself away. The word that trails Putman is “toyboy” — a diminutive with no straight-faced male equivalent, a word that decides the man is a possession and the woman slightly ridiculous before a single fact arrives. There is no neutral term doing this work. “Trophy wife,” the nearest thing, flatters the older man; “toyboy” needles the older woman. The reporting claims to relay a story while the noun does the judging. Hammond has said the label “bears no relation to what we have at all,” which is another way of saying she can see the editorialising happening inside the description.

What makes her response worth writing about is how little she performs it. She stages no vulnerability and demands no allyship. She describes the man — easy company, someone who “sees me for who I am” — and lets the description stand where an argument is expected. She has spoken about the confidence the relationship gave her through a long stretch of ill health and change, but she offers it as a fact rather than an exhibit. The refusal to plead is the most articulate thing about the whole business.

The tell is simple. No one will run a piece next week asking a man in his fifties to justify a girlfriend in her twenties, and everyone knows it. Until that story exists, Hammond’s “defence” was never a defence. It is a woman being tried for something the culture files, in a man, under good fortune.

Tags: age gap relationships, Alison Hammond, celebrity relationships, David Putman, This Morning