If the lyrics to all our Top 40 tunes were merged, writes James Hollis in The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, it would sound like this: “I was miserable until you came into my life and then everything felt brand new and we were on top of the world until you changed and we lost what we had and you moved away and now I’m miserable and will never love again until the next time.”

Despite our illusions of love (and disillusions), hope springs eternal, the irrepressible belief that next time we’ll finally board the glory train and make love work—as long as we find the right partner for once. But believing that your past relationships didn’t work because you hadn’t met the right person, the soulmate that destiny supposedly manufactured especially for you, is like wishing you could paint, but instead of actually learning the art, you insist that when you find just the right object, you’ll instinctively begin painting with mastery.

It’s hard to say when, if ever, you’re truly ready for a new relationship, or have gotten over your last one. There’s no certificate of readiness; some things can only be learned on the job—from inside a relationship—and life sometimes just tosses you into the deep end, ready or not.

After ending a 20-year marriage many years ago, straightforward logic, if not sheer exhaustion, informed me that coupling up again anytime before the next ice age would be insane. But no sooner had I dusted myself off (about a year), no sooner had the moon-and-stars stopped spinning cartoonlike around my head, than I was off and running again, hunting and gathering with the kind of hunger that makes a 20-year marriage feel like Chinese food that leaves you hungry two hours after you’re finished.

How much of this impulse was to connect, how much to heal, how much to neutralize the pain, how much to forget, it was hard to say. But it was a juggernaut, and my........

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