Luke Ford

One of the scary parts of having a relationship is becoming vulnerable and pathetic.

When you’re alone, you don’t have to confront your delusions. You can live in them. You can think you are funny and wise and biting when you’re really just a shmuck. You can think you are fabulous and sexy when you’re really an aging old bag.

I love how forty-plus women keep reassuring each other how "fabulous" they’re looking.

I love it when forty-plus women dress like teenage girls.

I love that scene in the movie Elegy when the fifty-plus Patricia Clarkson does a striptease before the professor protagonist. As he looks at her aging flesh, he thinks about how good he had it with Penelope Cruz. Who wants something moldy when you can buy before the sell-by date?

I just watched two seasons of "The Tudors" — a great Showtime series. Poor Anne Boleyn is going out of her mind trying to figure out how to hold King Henry Viii’s sexual interest.

She doesn’t last too long.

The half-life of a sexual relationship is six weeks. That means, six weeks after you start having sex, the sexual attraction between you is about half as strong.

You show me a beautiful woman and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of having sex with her.

What keeps a man tethered to a woman is rarely her erotic power (though the absence of such power will often doom a relationship). What keeps him around is that he grows to love all of her, not just her body parts. What also keeps him around is that cheating is a hassle and usually expensive. Also, he may have a self-image of himself as a forthright monogamous guy. Also, he may have an allegiance to a value system that frowns on cheating.

When I was 20 years old, I had this fling with a hot 29-year old single mom. She told me how she had these erotic photos of herself taken for her husband and he was unimpressed. (They then split.)

Well, duh! Few men would want their woman posing erotically for someone else. And few men would want erotic photos of their woman. That’s not what binds a man to a woman. Her body may be great but his infatuation with it will typically only last weeks unless she has a lot more going on.

I’ve dated various women who wanted to do strip-teases for me. I wasn’t into it. First of all, this was strictly against the Torah. Second, usually only strippers can pull off a strip-tease and I don’t like thinking of my woman as a sex worker. Third, women over 30 should rarely try to pull off a strip-tease. My sensitivity to the feelings of aging women prevents me from going into detail about why this is true.

I have sympathy for women who want to feel that their man is erotically tied to her. I have my needs too in relationships. I want to feel like the most important thing in the world to my woman and I want her to put forth some effort into looking attractive for me. But I don’t need all these kinks. I don’t need dress-up. I don’t fetishize. I have a healthy manly love for the right woman. She doesn’t need to degrade herself for my pleasure.

A lot of wives ask me how much they should be willing to degrade themselves for their husband’s pleasure. They fear that if they’re not up to snuff, he’ll have her head cut off just like ol’ Henry did to Anne Boleyn.

I wish I had some specific guidelines. I invite my readers’ comments.

Chaim Amalek emails: I’ve noticed this as well, all these barren forty-something women showering their attention not on human beings, but on large dogs. In the past, I think it would have been cats, but it seems that large dogs are the new cats. Obviously a substitute for caring for older children their bodies tell them should be in their homes. Very sad.

Thank God you and I have the internet to keep us busy, or who knows what we might own.

PS How would you rank the following groups of Juden in terms of honesty in business affairs?

Galicianers
Hungarians (ie., SATMAR)
Haredi in general
SY Jews
Russian Jews
Persian Jews
Secular American Jews