I asked my husband to leave at 11pm on a Thursday night. By 8pm Friday night, I’d created a profile on Match.com. I was 45 years old and alone for the first time in 16 years.
Some time in the middle of that first sleepless night, I hatched the plan to renovate our basement into a mother-in-law apartment for my soon-to-be ex. I reasoned that while it’d be painful for him to stay in the house, it’d be excruciating for him to leave and take my children with him, even part-time. But the contractor said it’d take six weeks to have the new space move-in-ready, so B moved about a mile away to a friend’s. It ended up taking six months, and I’ve never been so grateful for an over-promise and under-deliver. I took that six months to start to wrap my head and heart around the implosion that had just happened to my life. And I started dating. Immediately. Before the sheets on B’s side of the bed were even cold.
A friend stunned me with the news that if it weren’t for online dating in the seven years since her own divorce, she’d not have had a single date. The last time I was single I was 28. And online dating was brand new, I think. Or maybe we were still in the era of taking personal ads out in The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly. Either way, back then resorting to such blatant tactics was something to be whispered or white-lied about, not advertised. And I hadn’t a clue how much had changed in the past 16 years–both in terms of HOW to date but also WHO I’d be dating.
So I set out to do ethnographic research…what was it like to meet men in their 40s, with a broken marriage and two children and all the raw sewage in the bag and baggage I was suddenly aware I’d be dragging behind me? I had no idea how surreal the world would be that I’d just tripped into. It became clear almost immediately that I was now a member of a club I had no desire to join. And that my learning curve was about to get really steep. Really fast.
The Fish and her Bicycle 