I Had Sworn Off Love After A Brutal Divorce. An Unexpected DM Changed Everything

“My unwillingness to even consider dating again was about something deeper, and I knew it.”

Director of Operations at Alzheimer's Society

“Are you going to start dating soon, or what?” Chris and I leaned against our still-hot cars in the school pickup line.

“Tien’s fully back on the horse,” she said of our mutual friend whose divorce unleashed a wildness in her.

“She’s back on every horse,” I said, getting in my car. “Anyway, I have no time for that nonsense.”

“Everyone has time for that nonsense,” she yelled. I wound up my window, conversation over.

While it’s true that time was tight, my unwillingness to even consider dating again was about something deeper, and I knew it.

At 45, I was a single mother of two teenagers and a seven-year-old. I had just come off a brutal divorce from a man I’d known since I was 10, who grew up three doors down, whose parents knew my parents, whose friends were my friends.

He had been part of the architecture of my life, and when his infidelities were revealed through the divorce process, I lost trust in everything, including myself.

When I was young, I loved to dive. When I threw a one and a half pike, I’d brush my toes against the end of the board on my way into the water. I always knew where my body was in space, and I never got hurt.

One of my recurring dreams is that I’m on a diving board. I start my approach, but as I near the end, the board warps toward the water. There’s no resistance, no control. I am flung sideways, flailing into the air. I land on the hard concrete of the pool’s edge.

How could I possibly engage in a new relationship when I didn’t trust my own judgment – when I no longer knew where I was in space?

Around the time of that parking lot conversation, I went to a memorial for an old high school friend. During the program, a classmate sang a song he’d written about our mutual friend, something about a falling star, about jumping a fence to search for it, about how we’re all looking for something beyond ourselves.

Something about the man performing annoyed me. He sat there, bent over his guitar singing his meaningful song, his straight brown hair falling into his face, his dorky glasses slipping down his nose. He seemed so decent. But I had learned about people who seemed decent.

“I’m Geoff,” he said at the reception, plate in hand.

“OK,” I said. I was not in the market for friends. I was anti-friend.

“Nice song,” I told him, and left.

But this man and his song stuck in my head.

A year later,........

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