Those who know me also know that I am a cynic, especially in matters of the heart; however, if they truly know me (and only a handful of people truly do), then they know that I came by that cynicism through my long marriage to a very selfish and cruel man -- not physically cruel, but mentally and emotionally nasty. I was married for more than twenty years, but I'd say that at least fifteen of them were truly loveless years.
So, why did I stay? Ahh, therein lies the rub, right? I stayed for the old cliche -- I thought it was best for my kids to have both their parents in their daily lives. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn't. I cannot go back and undo the harm I may have caused them by staying where I shouldn't have stayed. All I can do is go forward and try to fix the damage done to my own heart.
Shortly after we separated, I signed up for an online dating site -- I won't say which one, but it was a free site that had been recommended to me by a friend who had found love on it. I wasn't necessarily looking for love, but rather I was hoping to find that there were some decent men out there who would be genuinely interested in me, a very lonely middle-aged woman who had a lot to offer a guy who would really value me.
I got some ridicule from people who were surprised that I was looking for a man so soon after my separation. After all, I wasn't divorced, and divorces can take awhile to accomplish, and I had my children to consider, and also, I'm sure, they were mostly astounded that I wanted to move on so quickly and that I wasn't more broken-hearted about my pending divorce. While all those things did affect me, they didn't change the fact that I had been miserably lonely for far too long in a loveless marriage that had been slowly killing me from the inside. I didn't need to "get over" my husband -- I'd gotten over him long, long, long ago.
Mostly, my first venture into the online dating world was a matter of pure curiosity. However, I was both pleasantly surprised and a bit perplexed by just how many men of all ages were on that same site looking to find the right woman. Admittedly, many of them were just looking for casual sex, and many of them were lying in their profiles, but those are easy to spot, and none of them received any replies from me to the various messages they sent my way either blatantly asking me to have sex with them or doing it in a veiled way.
In my initial quest, I was only looking for somebody to date. I didn't want anything beyond that as I was not even divorced yet. I just wanted to spend some time with a man who was interested in me for the things that are important to me -- my smarts and my sense of humor. I met a very nice man who was a few years younger than me, and we went out for about a month or two. He became quite needy of my attention, though, so I broke it off with him because he was ready for a long-term commitment while I wasn't, and despite the fact that I'd made that very clear to him from the get-go, he seemed intent on changing my mind. He wasn't right for me in many ways, but he showed me that nice guys do exist, and that it was really quite easy for me to find somebody to date.
At the time that one was coming to an end, I answered a message from a man who shared a lot of similar traits with me according to the dating site. We had a 93% compatibility match, and after reading all the information on his profile, I could see that he was genuine and quite nice, so I replied to his initial message. We began a correspondence, and then we met. While he wasn't my idea of what I wanted physically-speaking, he did have a lot of the characteristics of a man I'd want to spend time with. He was very, very nice and attentive. He opened doors for me, he held my hand while we walked places, he really listened to me, he went out of his way to help me with projects, and I could go on and on. Initially, I began to see him just to have somebody to spend time with, but it soon developed into more of a relationship.
We ended up staying together for over a year; however, along the way, he had professed his love for me a couple times, but I just couldn't return the sentiment. While I cared for him very much, I knew that I didn't love him, and I knew that what we had would have to come to end sometime to be fair to him. It was good on so many levels while it lasted, though, and I was loath to end it, but eventually it was our differences that slowly brought it to an end. While we were compatible in so many ways, we were not compatible in areas that became too insurmountable. His religion is super important to him, and I don't care for religion at all -- I prefer to have a personal relationship with the divine that is guided by my own beliefs rather than one dictated to me by others. I detest the snow and the cold weather, and he adores it. I am an avid traveler who can't wait to go abroad again, but he's never been outside the U.S. and fears doing so. There were other things as well, all of which just finally drove us apart, and while I was sad to see it end, I also knew that it was for the best for both of us. I wish him well in his search for that woman who he can spend the rest of his life treating well and who will return the love that he so freely gives.
During the year that we dated, though, I did actually get divorced, and I've now been happily divorced for about nine months. Immediately after the break-up, a part of me decided that I'd had enough of trying to find somebody. After all, that part said, if I really couldn't love the truly nice guy I'd seen for over a year, then maybe I wasn't capable of loving any man ever again. Maybe the emotional cruelty I'd suffered in my marriage had effectively killed off that sentiment forever. I knew I loved, of course. I love my children more than anything, I love my best friend dearly, and I love my parents along with some other family and friends. But maybe I wasn't able to love in the head-over-heels romantic mushy sense anymore.
That thought made me very, very sad.
And I refused to believe it.
So, I decided to give that dating site one more try. I figured I'd go on for about a month, and if nothing good came of it, then I'd give up on trying to find love that way, focus on me a bit more and then just see what happened with my life.
Just like the first time, I immediately began to receive messages -- most from men I wasn't at all interested in, and a few (disturbingly) from men in their twenties apparently on the prowl for "cougars." I didn't reply to any of those messages. I did find a couple men that interested me a lot, and I reached out to them only to be quite embarrassed when neither replied to me. Sooooo, I was on the verge of just calling it quits after about a week and a half of using the site when the profile of a man who had visited my site caught my attention.
I decided to put myself out there one final time. I sent him a very short message. He replied right away. Here was progress. We messaged a bunch of times and then began to use the instant messaging chat option on the site, and I discovered how funny he was and how much we had in common -- we're both brainy and total nerds who love to travel and hate, hate, hate cold weather among other things.
From there, we quickly moved to texting via our phones and then to an actual voice conversation. Then we met. And then I knew that my heart wasn't as frosty as I'd feared.
While I haven't known him long, I have found somebody that I want to be with and talk with all the time, and I have found a warm spot in my heart that just keeps getting warmer and warmer ever since he entered my life. Do I dare hope that love has finally found me? Time will tell, but I hope so, and isn't that what makes life worth living -- hope.
