by Emily Johnson

Created on: January 11, 2009

I hope my female friends won't quit on me after the next sentence because things will improve, I promise. Now here goes: Our husbands or partners who (hopefully) love us more than life itself, do too wish (in their very weakest moments) and not all the time but just every now and then, that we could be the Hollywood bombshell.

To believe otherwise is not just kidding ourselves, it's just plain worthy of being hauled off to an asylum if any still existed. Men are not perfect. I know because I've been married to a perfect man for 20 years. For 20 years, my female friends have raved about this guy. He's nicer, smarter, sweeter, a better father, more handsome, more successful, more sensitive, more loving than the men most of my friends are married to. Did you notice that wiggle room I left? Still, I pretty much hit the jack-pot, but trust me, there is always room for improvement.

In a truly loving relationship, beauty is on the inside. Yet every now and then, even the most virtuous and morally upstanding of the opposite sex will find something to be attracted to in a woman whose body is slightly more, um, well, different than our own. And by the way, if my own spouse is reading, this is not permission to ever admit those thoughts to me because I don't want to hear them. Which is why he doesn't tell me if he has them, and which is why your husbands or partners don't tell you, either. Most decent men know it isn't okay, and we should give them a break because they do feel guilty. The point is that acting on those thoughts is what separates the men we love from the boys who should be whacked upside the head and left to rot in a cabbage field.

The question should not be so much about inside-versus-outside beauty as determined by strangers we've never met. It's about how beauty is defined by those whose opinions are most important. Even our door-knob husbands know the difference between real and contrived beauty. Here are just a few examples of real beauty in a woman from the perspective of a loving husband or partner who, well, let's just say he's passed the cabbage field test:

Real beauty is when you have been perspiring for 15 hours in the delivery room with your child, no make up, wearing coke-bottle glasses versus contacts, and in dire need of some deodorant, and he leans over just after cutting the cord and tells you with genuine love in his eyes that you are the most lovely woman in the world.

Real beauty is when you were going to surprise him while he was on a business

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