The other day I came across a phrase I had not heard before: “starter husband.”
It popped up, along with the accompanying outrage — and isn’t everyone in a snit about one thing or another these days? — during an ad campaign recently launched by Nine West, a shoe company.
One of the ads features a woman in a pair of fake animal-skin high heels standing, arrows in hand, next to a bull’s eye. The ad, titled “Starter Husband Hunting,” also includes the text: “Whether you’re looking for Mr. Right or Mr. Right Now, we got a shoe for that.”
While a few grammarians predictably took issue with the failure to know the difference between “we” and “we’ve,” the bulk of the backlash seems to be aimed at the reference to “husband hunting.”
To which I say, never mind all the fuss over the idea that modern women might — horrors — still engage in the act of husband hunting. Rather, a quick glance at the stilettos featured in Nine West online ads leads me to believe women who stagger around in these things will instead be podiatrist hunting.
Then again, maybe that eligible podiatrist over in the next office could also make a suitable starter husband. But first, let’s define the variations of the word “starter,” as I once knew it:
- Starter, as in the gun, or person firing said gun that begins an athletic race of some sort.
- Starter, as in the person who sees that golfers get off at the right time and tee.
- Starter, as in the motor that starts your car engine.
- Starter, as in the yeast that causes bread to rise.
Actually I have more than a perfunctory knowledge of starters as they relate to automobiles. Back in the 1970s, we owned a station wagon that went through three of them in a year’s time. It got so my husband began carrying a spare starter in the back of the car.
As for the starter used to make bread rise, I have no direct experience with that, although I once knew a woman who had such an unfortunate episode with yeast and its powers that she was forced to bury the resultant still-expanding loaf in her backyard.
OK, back to “starter” as it now appears to relate to husbands. From what I can glean from a few articles here and there, a starter husband is a man young women deliberately choose to marry with the idea that the marriage will last no more than five years, with no children.
As one young woman — married at 22, divorced at 26 — explained on “Good Morning America”: “I view marriage as a rehearsal. Now I am ready to play the part better because I can expect more of people and they can expect more of me.” Ah, well, who knows? Maybe her husband felt the same way.
Such, however, was not the case for another young woman, married just 11 months, who told Marie Claire magazine that her husband was crushed when she demanded a divorce, telling her: “I don’t understand. We’re married.”
Sure, she felt awful, she told the magazine, but also relieved. “It was literally an entry-level marriage.”
Kids. Whaddaya gonna do with ’em? Meanwhile, two thoughts spring to mind as I try to digest all this. One is that these young women will no doubt soon be redefined in yet another category, that of “trophy wife.”
The second is more hope than thought: that their discarded “starter husbands” find new wives who truly deserve them. All the same, guys, I’d watch out for those “starter” stilettos.
