As I enter more fully into the dating world, you’ll find that posts about my dating life, for the most part, will be paywalled. This is a particularly vulnerable topic and thus I want to protect myself and my partner(s). Please note that while these posts are about dating, they are really about my heart. What it feels like to open it back up. How I’m growing into a woman who stands up for herself. So whether you find yourself dating or not, there is much within these missives that I hope will be relatable.
In case you couldn’t tell from this post, my post-divorce dating life went from this high to a very low, low.
Of course it would. The high was extreme. Two months of total infatuation. Texts throughout the day. Multiple visits per week when I wasn’t with my kids. It got hot and heavy quickly and then, shockingly, things got messy.
I found myself in what the kids these days call a “situationship.” Not a relationship. We weren’t really dating. In this new dating world, you can be caught in the in-between for months. Some people call it “talking.” Usually it’s when things are supposed to be casual.
But I’m not sure I know how to do casual. Or perhaps this connection was never casual in the first place.
It was not a smart choice from the start. There was the age difference. The fact he was only looking for casual. The distance between our two homes. The fact that we wanted very different things in the future - him, wife and kids. Me, no more marriage and the baby shop is closed.
So of course it would have to end. But it surprised me how much it hurt when it did.
I ended things. Or actually, maybe he did. Because here is the thing. Men often don’t end relationships. They sabotage them.
This happened in my marriage. And it happened in my first connection post divorce.
To be clear, we were never exclusive. And yet, neither one of us was sleeping with anyone else. He told me when a past hookup reached out and he’d turned her down. That certainly made me feel good even though if he’d made a different choice, it wouldn’t have been against the rules. I went on a couple dates. One even ended in a kiss. But nothing more. It was hard to pour energy into new connections when I knew how good this one was.
I knew it was dangerous putting all my eggs in one basket. And yet. That is exactly what I did.
We coasted along in the throes of new relationship energy. We got closer. I got more vulnerable. So did he. We were veering dangerously into relationship territory. We spent a day hiking in Big Sur. We both were developing feelings though neither of us said as much.
The week he slept with someone else, I met him at the library where I was working in his town waiting for him to get off work.