I've been masochistically perusing Bailey's Facebook photos, professional glamour shots, many of them beautiful. Bailey is my ex-husband's girlfriend. She is 29.  He is 53. They met at a convention soon after Stan and I split up.

Stan and I are still close friends, so I get to hear all about his relationship and I listen because now I'm not his stewing ex wife, I'm just his friend, possibly even his best friend. And that's how I came to know that the thing he loves most about Bailey is her youth. He told me so just the other day over a breakfast of eggs and toast at a restaurant downtown. Because I am his friend and he tells me things.

I've always known that Stan was attracted to younger women, which really sucked for me since I was only getting older, day by day, wrinkle by wrinkle. When we were married he was obsessed with the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in particular the actress who played Willow and the other one, her lesbian lover, whatever her name was. I probably would have enjoyed the show if I didn't hate it so much. Our marriage was already falling apart by then. It wasn't the show. I know that.

As a professor and a rock star in his field, Stan has the ideal career for a man enchanted by younger women. When we were married he was always meeting with graduate students, and there were a couple in particular who seemed to take up most of his time. He referred to them casually in conversation and I assumed, given my own misconceptions about women in his field, that they had to be mieskeits.  Oh, how ridiculously wrong I was. They, and many other girls in his orbit, were drop dead gorgeous. And even if I wasn't half bad myself, they had something I would never again possess. I was living in a college town where the visitors, like vampires, never aged. That's something that only happened to the rest of us. But it only mattered for the wives.

"It's not physical, not at all," Stan explained, sopping up the last big of egg with his bread crust. "It's. . . the lack of baggage.  It's exciting being with someone who is just so... new."

I know it shouldn't have bothered me. We are no longer married and I've been happily partnered for five years. But I am also a woman sliding into my invisible years after a lifetime of attention from men.  I am closer to the end of my career, unlike Bailey, who is standing at the threshold of hers. And even though I don't want to be married to Stan anymore, I also like to pretend that he still wants me. The truth is, he doesn't and he didn't when we were married. 

What I fail to understand is why someone so new would want someone so old. But I suppose that's a story for another time.