HOW TO AVOID BECOMING A WIDOW

You are a young woman looking for a husband.

Your cave-mother instincts are pushing you toward the big, hairy ape playing left tackle on the football team. But your right brain is signaling the scrawny geek in your math class. You are also drawn to Toby, who makes you laugh. You've had your eye on Jonah, who shares all of your interests. And then there's ....

And way in the back of your mind is the knowledge that you will outlive all of them and end up a widow like your mother did. (All over the world, whether the average lifespan is 85 or 35, women outlive their men.)

If you want to avoid widowhood, which guy do you pick?

Actually, you don't know enough about any of them.

What you should be doing is searching for the signs which will tell you which one is likely to be especially long-lived. And science is making many such signs available to us.

If a guy loved to play car-racing video games as a kid, he's likely to turn out to be a reckless and aggressive driver, according to the Journal of Experimental Psychology. He is more likely to crash and burn, leaving you alone in life prematurely. If you marry this type, the only way to avoid widowhood is to get in the car with him.

Pick a guy who likes dark chocolate. Johns Hopkins University did a study that shows that eating small amounts of dark chocolate every day reduces platelet clumping in the blood, which in turn reduces the tendency to have fatal strokes, heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms. Even if the guy doesn't die, caring for a stroke victim can be stressful and depressing for the caregiver.

Check out your guy's father. A middle-aged man who shrinks an inch or more is 60% more likely to die earlier, according to a major medical study conducted by the Royal Free & University College Medical School in the United Kingdom. Putting your potential father-in-law on the rack won't help. Osteoporosis is the villain. And it's often passed from father to son genetically.

If your guy's father is has reached middle age without major disease problems, there's nearly a 70% chance he'll make it to 85. While you're not marrying the father, there's a good chance that good health in the form of good genes has been passed on to Junior. The study, conducted among 5,820 Japanese-American men from Hawaii, warned about the futures of men with such mid-life crises as smoking, high blood sugar levels, high blood pressure, and being single. Men with those kinds of problems tend to die earlier. If your guy's father is a three-time loser, best to seek out another prospect.

Check out your lover's mom on a whole lot of counts:

First of all, find out how old she was when she gave birth. A University of Chicago study of centenarians has found that children born to women under 25 years of age were twice as likely than children born to older mothers to live to be a hundred or more. While you may not want your guy to hang around for a century, you certainly want to avoid a guy who was born when his mother was pushing fifty.

Look carefully at the family pictures. If your guy's grandmother was a hefty Swede, watch out. Recent studies show that their grandchildren have a much higher incidence of diabetes. Scientists believe that overeating in women causes changes in gene activity which negatively impacts children and grandchildren. Australian scientists have found the same tendency in mice. Even if you aren't planning to hook up with the son of a Swede or a mouse, you may want to shun the sons of overly obese mothers, regardless of nationality.

Because your fellah will have to thrive in a world where brains are paramount and muscle is not, you should check out the mother's diet. According to studies by the National Institute for Health, pregnant women who ate fish were more likely to have better developed, more intelligent children than women who avoided fish. The Omega-3 fatty acids in fish are a key for brain development in the fetus. Children of fish-hating mothers were 48% more likely to have lower verbal IQs at age eight. If your guy's mother is a "meat and potatoes" lady, you might want to go on the prowl over at Red Lobster.

So what happens if you skip all the warnings in this article and marry the hairy ape who's great in the sack?

There's one last thing you can do to avoid widowhood: Buy a house next to a five-star rated hospital.

If something bad happens, he'll have 69% lower chance of dying than if he's rushed to a one star-rated hospital.

(click here for a printable version of this article)