A 77-year-old woman married her 23-year-old husband after the two met at her son’s funeral– and now they are celebrating six years of wedded bliss.

Almeda and Gary Hardwick, from Tennessee, who have a 53-year age gap, met in 2015, when Almeda was 71 and Gary was still 17. Before Almeda even spoke to Gary properly, she said she remembered thinking: ‘he was The One’.

Gary – who is younger than one of Almeda’s grandsons – previously described himself as ‘really mature for his age’, and revealed that he had just come out of an unhappy relationship with a 77-year-old woman when he met Almeda.

From then on, they started seeing each other every night. They asked for the blessing of Gary’s mom Tammy, then 48, and his grandmother Carolyn, then 71.

And Gary proposed to Almeda just two weeks after they started dating, with the couple tying the knot on October 26, 2015, by which time Gary was 18.

After marrying, the pair moved into Almeda’s house with one of her grandsons who is three years older than her new husband.

Despite some ups and downs, including Almeda suffering a heart attack, the couple are stronger than ever and admit that their sex life is still great.

Now, six years on, Gary has shared a video on their TikTok account showing a picture montage of their lives each year.

He captioned the video: ‘So many more wonderful years to come.’