"When Your Husband Leaves You for a Younger Woman"

I regularly check my website logs to see how people are finding my site. They come here on the strangest search terms (the most popular, lately, being "Jennifer Love Hewitt's butt" after I wrote a commentary about the media frenzy over it). I'm also quite curious when people are Googling my name. Who are they? Are they looking for me or for the only other Stephanie Brail in existence? (I think she's maybe 10 years younger than I am, living somewhere in the Midwest.) Is it an ex-boyfriend? A former friend? How come they rarely send me a note?

One Google search caught my eye today: "When Your Husband Leaves You for a Younger Woman." I'm not sure why this search brought up this particular website, but there it was. And I can't help but think what a sad search term this is. A woman puts her best years into a marriage, only to have her husband leave her when he's suffering a mid-life crisis. The younger woman, emboldened by youth, doesn't think twice about stealing a husband from a loyal wife; she's saving him from a bad marriage after all.

When this happens, it makes you wonder what marriage really is about. Is it really about love? Because if it was, wouldn't age be a non-issue? So why are certain women more "marketable" as marriage prospects because of their youth and beauty? Is marriage less of an expression of love and more of a transaction for many?

The woman trades in her beauty in order to get financial stability (or she hopes). That's the cynical way of looking at it.

I have a friend in her mid-thirties, who is already divorced but living with a man, who is terrified she will become too old for marriage someday. But then she consoles herself that the man who marries her at 50 will truly be marrying her for love, and not her youth or beauty.

It's not just women who are commodities in these transactions, however. Consider the man with money. He may wonder (and rightly so) whether his wife is truly with him out of pure love or out of the fortune he brings her. Will she stick around if his career fails and he ends up poor? I guess he'll be finding out the hard way.

Let's hope that as we move past gender stereotypes that more people marry out of love than out of infatuation, looks, and money. That requires thinking long and hard before entering any sort of marriage, and making sure you are doing it for the right reasons and not the wrong reasons. Don't be fooled by a pretty face or big bank account. Do you have the maturity, the shared values, the friendship, and all that it takes to make a marriage last?

I think the idea of growing old together is highly romantic, and certainly something I'd rather experience than a mid-life divorce, don't you?