Oooh, a failed magician whose education in sexuality and psychology is from Dungeons and Dragons, Anthony Robbins and Casanova - a fantasy game, a charlatan and a pedophile. He must be a wise ass - sorry, wise man.

One might suggest that someone who advises insulting, isolating and stalking women as a model of social success, is a self-centered, maladjusted twerp with borderline sociopathic dysfunction. One might think that an unattractive guy who likes to dress up in a cross between Snoopy on his Sopweth Camel and Ru Paul at a Joan Crawford film festival then video himself all the time might have a little problem with women plus some identity issues, but one would be wrong.

One would be wrong because your doubts make you wrong. Erik knows stuff - but he's trustworthy, like a preacher, because he's not keeping secrets. He's selling them. He doesn't just instruct men on how to prey upon, sorry, seduce women, Erik also teaches levitation.

Gravity only applies when you believe it does. You can't levitate as long as you're attached to the annoying idea of verifiable reality. Like Tony Robbins says, walking on fire burns your feet only when you doubt your ability to walk on fire.

Fire doesn't burn. Gravity is a myth. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Any preacher, any salesman, any Freudian will tell you that once you sight your mark, er, find people who crave certainty, all you have to do is fan their self doubt into a flaming belief in whatever answer you have to sell. The problem becomes their doubt, not your veracity.

Erik's "artistry" is political posturing. Any lie, spin, illusion or delusion, if announced loudly and frequently (preferably on television with a companion web site, seminar, video and book - all sold at a high enough cost as proof of it's value) becomes the truth. Other participants in this "artistry" include Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Tony Snow, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney ...oh, you know all those people who disdain a reality-based existence.

LW could be me and a heap of my friends. So, when many of the letters attack LW as bitter, ugly or as a representative of some other person or a historical incident, I have to wonder, did someone his a nerve?.

In my office there are at least a dozen women of about 50 who've been dumped by their husbands for a younger woman. There are another dozen in their 40's who've found that men their own age want to date women 15 years younger.

Maybe there's a reality that men are able to get younger women so they do. After all, Hollywood pairs teenagers with old guys all the time. Presidential candidate Fred Thompson dumped his wife of 22 years to proudly tomcat around before marrying a woman younger than his youngest child - just in time for making a run at the highest office. Salon.com's Farhad Manjoo ran an article about being disappointed at his second family and the facts of fatherhood over 50.

If an increasing number of old men with young women is the reality, it's going to be perpetuated by the children of those May-December relationships who think that's the norm. But blaming LW for wanting to be in a loving relationship even if the odds are against her is unfair and mean. Wanting intimacy is normal and healthy. What's not healthy is to focus on having a man or on having a family no matter what the prime relationship is.

That's not what LW's doing. She's got a life - as do I, as do my single over 40 friends and those now ex wives - but she's angry and disappointed. Why is that bad? Isn't that accepting reality and trying to cope?

It's easy to tell someone to build s life that supplants or goes around the need for a primary relationship, but that doesn't account for simply missing or longing for one. It takes courage not to settle for a less than loving relationship and you never know if the person you're seeing, man or woman, is capable of commitment until you get to that point.

For every young woman like the letter writer who's realized that when she's done taking care of the children she and a 45 year old husband would have together, she'll be taking care of him, there's another young woman falling for the old line, "My wife doesn't understand me...." or "Let me take care of you in style...."

And there's us, the older women, enjoying the lives we lead without having to have a relationship, but wishing for close connection just like everybody else.

I couldn't find statistics on the age differences in marriage in the US. However, the US Census bureau and the National Institutes of Health track ages of parents.

25% of mothers are under 20,

44% are 25 -29,

22% are over 30 and

9% over 40.

38% of fathers are under 30,

30% are between 30-35,

32% are over 35.

I don't know why they don't break it down in the same ages, but the if 69% of mothers are under 30 but 62% of fathers are over 30, there's a very real age gap in parents' ages.

There might be something to LW's hypothesis.