Until I started dating a couple months ago, I didn’t feel single. Sure, I felt divorced. Yes, I felt unpartnered. But I didn’t feel single. I felt grateful. Content. Full of time for myself. Grounded. Complete.
I was uninterested in dating for more than two years. I had moments when I was curious. That one time I went on a blind date. But I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. I think sometimes this can surprise divorced women. Just how good it can feel on the other side. Just how little is lacking.
Then, that hunger arose. I knew, and still know, that the next level of my healing lies in this arena. Can I tolerate exposing my heart to someone else? Can I let someone in? Learn to communicate my needs? Be hurt by someone and confront them instead of retreating within and licking my wounds, reminding myself that this is why I don’t put myself out there?
When you gather the gumption to leave a marriage, you’ve forgotten about the good stuff. The good stuff is so far in the past it feels like a distant memory, a fever dream that maybe was never real in the first place. What you remember about partnership, about “love,” is work, and obligation, and feeling overlooked, constant sacrifice. Better to leave all that in the past. What were we even thinking? I don’t even understand the appeal.
But then I started dating, got swept up in a story, in a feeling, in a man. When I wasn’t with him, I would miss him. And if not him, then the feeling I had when I was with him.
Let me tell you what happens when you begin to taste what gets us into complicated love stories in the first place. You remember. You remember how good it feels…to have their hand on your leg…to be back in their arms…to be wanted and validated…to feel your heart skip a beat when their name pops up on your phone.
I’m not even talking love here. I haven’t gotten to that stage. But dear God did I taste the sweetness. Of connection. Pleasure. Fun. Delight.
Ooof. I say ooof because it is so so good. But then I remember it can all be taken away. That, in fact, that is how most love stories end.
All of a sudden, I felt single in a way I didn’t before. Hadn’t for twenty two years when I was twenty three and started dating my ex-husband. I remembered all too well that pull to be partnered. With someone. Dear God, at least not…alone.
I see now why women post-divorce decide to never re-enter the arena. Because life can be very good without the drama, the dopamine, the uncertainty. When I was on my own those two years, I had control. Over my days and my time and most definitely my mood. I was a focused mother even on those weeks my kids were not with me. We would often Facetime or they would stop by. I prided myself on always being available. I could pour myself into the work that I’d never had enough time for. I connected with other writers and attended writers conferences.
Mother and writer were my two primary identities. I felt like I could at last be both! Those weeks without my children granted me the ability to manage it all.
But I am more than a mother and a writer. I am a 45 year old woman who has never really shown up for herself in a relationship. Never opened her heart and her soul in the way we were designed to. I know more growth is beckoning in this arena. If I have the stomach for it.
I recently came across this essay on Erotic Decisions by
.It starts thus:
“Life starts with erotic decisions.
Life doesn’t begin at birth. Nor at conception. Nor at some abstract marker of consciousness or legality. It begins, in earnest, at the moment of trembling recognition. When something stirs beneath reason. When you want something – or someone – without being able to explain why, and you choose to move toward it. That is the erotic decision. The moment that cracks open the script you have been given and offers you, terrifyingly, an alternative. Not necessarily better, certainly not safer…. but alive. And that is where life begins.”
She goes on:
“To choose an erotic life is not simply to chase pleasure or gratification; that would be to mistake Eros for Hedone. Rather, it is to say “yes” to the kind of friction that transforms.”
And on:
“To make an erotic decision is to be willing to lose the self you were, for the self that might be born in the act of choosing.”
Here is the thing. I want to lose the self that I was. I am in the act of loosing her. She was guarded and closed off, to herself and others. She was afraid of her desire and thus squashed it for decades. She had been hurt in the deepest ways possible thus erected a number of protectors to keep herself safe. She was careful. Cautious. Alone. A ghost.
I want to live in a way where I open up. I want to follow my desire, explore it, fan its embers, worship its flame. I want to be willing to share and be known, even though it opens me up to heartbreak, because I know it will not annihilate me. I want to be daring. Bold. Connected. Alive.
The first few months of dating, I turned into a teenager. Even when I wasn’t going on dates, if I didn’t have my kids, I was out with friends. Staying out late. Drinking a little too much. I went from reading a book a week to barely being able to read at all. I couldn’t focus. I was always grabbing my phone to see if I had a new text. My appetite for food dried up. I wasn’t hungry for anything but sex. Men. Flirting. Attraction.
I had to move my body to deal with all this energy. Exercises classes or a walk or yoga. One day I walked 18k steps because I just had to keep moving. I got sick because I pushed myself too hard, spread myself too thin, didn’t sleep enough.
I was a walking turn on. Hormones on legs. Every man I saw, I checked out. Every single guy I was smiling at. I was always looking at ring fingers.
I knew it was out of control and yet I didn’t know how to contain it. This part of me had been caged for so long that once I let her out, she ran feral. She was terrified of being locked up again so she was going to get as much as she could while she can.
I am trying to calm her down now. Tell her that there is no longer a cage but a room within me in which she can live. No locked door but one she controls. She can yes, leave the room and have some fun but then she can go back to her room and rest a bit. She doesn’t constantly need to be on the prowl.
In some ways, I’m not sure she believes me.
So many times in the last couple weeks I have been tempted to throw in the towel as things got hard, as feelings got involved, as I saw how quickly this could all disappear. It was too much, too hard, too disruptive. Better to go back to how it was before. When I was safe.
But I know I want the disruption. I know this is the fire that will forge the next version of me.
Tamara continues:
“To choose the erotic is to orient the compass of your life by what makes your soul turn toward the light, not by what is expected or endorsed. And that can be excruciating. Because the erotic does not offer guarantees. Sometimes it leads us to joy. Sometimes to heartbreak. Often to both, simultaneously. But it always leads us somewhere real.”
So I try and manifest the stomach to continue. To not retreat back into my cocoon of not needing anything more.
Perhaps underneath the grief I have felt as I prepare myself to continue to put myself out there is untended grief from my past. The many times I was wounded by men and turned within to nurse my wounds instead of confronting their shitty behavior and standing my ground. The many cuts that I bandaged over trying to pretend they did not sting. The countless ways I abandoned myself in relationships, making myself smaller and smaller and smaller until I was nowhere to be found.
I don’t want to do that anymore. I must carve a new way.
Do I believe in love that conquers all? No. Am I seeking a fairy tale ending? Absolutely not.
What I want is a new version of myself who can open herself up but also protect herself. Who can name her own worth and value, setting boundaries and being willing to walk away. Who can choose to pursue love and also know that within her, she has everything she needs.
“And so, life begins, not once, but again and again, in the moment we allow ourselves to want what might ruin us, to risk what might remake us, to trust what we cannot name but must follow.” -
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I have heard several accounts from women that their first breakup post-divorce was much more gut wrenching than the divorce itself. I’m so interested in this phenomenon. That somehow the first time you put yourself back out there after the end of a marriage triggers all the unhealed wounds from the marriage itself. Has this been your experience? How did you deal with the fears that come from exposing your heart again? Leave a comment if you have thoughts or perspective!
Cindy, I think I could’ve written this entire post myself. Just got out of a 6 month whirlwind post-divorce relationship that has broken my heart far deeper than my divorce. this time I was showing up in this relationship purely as myself, representing no interests other than my own (meaning not my kids, not my economic security, not the expectations of my family and community). This entire thing was just for me: my heart, body and soul. I was showing up in a more deeply authentic way than I ever was capable of in my marriage. And so yes, it hurt a hell of a lot more.
I had actually shared that essay by Tamara with this particular lover, and it helped us explain to each other the powerful magnetic attraction that we had, so to see you reference it here as I am processing my way out of it is such a gift.
Wowowowow. I absolutely could have written this myself, I identify with everything you said. We owe it to ourselves to try, to risk the pain, to learn to be uncomfortable once and for all. And also, that nagging sensation in my marriage that I was dead… it’s time to live again. “Not necessarily better, certainly not safer…. but alive. And that is where life begins.”