Column 6 – The only thing more lonesome than a Thanksgiving alone is dating after divorce.

Originally published by reminagine.me
Photography: Dennis Wilkinson/Flickr

THERE’S NOTHING LONELIER than a Thanksgiving alone.

I remember one particularly tough one when I was in my early 30s, freshly sober and living in one of those cookie-cutter, two-story apartment complexes in Hollywood where you could reach out your window and pass milk across the courtyard.

On that Thanksgiving, I was stranded in town with nowhere to be and nobody to be with. My next-door neighbor, an old lady who lived with her daughter and granddaughter, whose groceries I often helped carry upstairs, noticed my condition and invited me over. It was weird being a complete stranger amidst a gathering of extended family whose numbers swelled way into the double digits by the time the dried out turkey and canned cranberries were served. Most of them ignored me, or seemed to be silently calculating what I was doing there.

I kept my mouth shut, except to eat, and watched the football game. Inevitably, a squabble broke out between a hotheaded brother and his equally hotheaded, and equally large, sister. Tempers flared, battle lines were drawn, sides picked, and the whole crew spilled into the courtyard to settle things. I grabbed the last piece of pumpkin pie, snuck back to my sparse apartment and took a nap.

This past Thanksgiving wasn’t one of those lonely ones.

It was filled with family and friends and juicy smoked turkey and pies and lots of dirty dishes that I gladly washed. Last year wasn’t one of them either. It, too, was filled with family and friends and turkey and dirty dishes, only I didn’t have to wash those. Another big difference was that we served cake instead of pie. Wedding cake.

My wife and I got married last Thanksgiving. But the biggest difference between last year and this year is that the bun that was in my wife’s oven then is now our beautiful eight-month-old daughter, Olivia.

This long and winding tale is really about them and how far fetched it once seemed that at 50 I’d be saying thanks for my awesome wife and first child, who is sweet and hilarious and likes to express her joy by performing a little jig with her kicking feet. With all the cousins and aunt and uncles and grandparents around on this past Thanksgiving, she was jigging a lot.

How far fetched was this past holiday?

Well, let’s go back to just a handful of years ago when I was recently divorced. To put it mildly, getting divorced in your mid-40s can be dreary. It’s an I’m supposed to be coming home to my wife and kids, not bad TV and a tuna sandwich kind of dreary.

The worst thing is dating.

Everyone with any sense, and especially the ones I paid to talk sense, told me to not even think about dating for a year. They said I needed time to lick my wounds and heal and that dating wouldn’t be good for me or anyone else. But there’s a particularly male imperative that goes: see problem, fix problem. The problem and solution seemed simple: No woman? Find woman! Or, possibly, if I’m looking even deeper: Ex-wife has boyfriend? Must get girlfriend!
But, of course, it’s not that simple.

The first post-separation date was a disaster. The woman was someone I’d known in the past—attractive, smart and age-appropriate. We had a nice dinner, went back to her place and things started heating up. Pretty soon, I found myself having an out-of-body experience during which the “spirit me” hovering above the “corporeal me” kept wondering what the hell we were doing there.
I quietly sobbed the entire drive home.

Apparently, comely Westside Los Angeles blondes weren’t actually what I wanted then. What I wanted was my wife, our dogs, our house and the life that seemed to have suddenly slipped through a trapdoor into the past.

I needed more time to accept that the past was where my previous life had gone and was going to stay. But, the imperative was too strong: See problem, fix problem.
Maybe it was better to look for someone who knew nothing about me. How do you do that? The online thing was where it was at, or so I’d heard, because, well, I hadn’t been dating since before the turn of the century. But the idea of advertising myself on something like Match.com felt uncomfortable. What would I say? Pretty good guy, likes dogs and people. Sucks at relationships. Plus, I can’t even figure out how to order from Amazon, how would I navigate online dating sites?

Craigslist seemed like a better bet, even though I’d never even bought a piece of furniture from it. But all you have to do is respond to other people’s advertisements, by email, which I knew how to do.

I went on three Craigslist dates. One was with a French woman who brought her dog over to my apartment. She hated me from the beginning. I still don’t know why. Another was with a 25 year-old who likely had daddy issues. Unfortunately, I didn’t. So, given our 20-year age difference, we didn’t have much in common. The last one was with a cool lady who, in better times, I might have gotten along with, but she lived less than a mile away. I was looking for a little more separation between me and whomever I’d inevitably let down.

You’re kind of between a rock and a hard place when you’re in your mid-40s and newly single. The available women are often too young to relate to and the ones you can have a great conversation with are often married, or, if they’re not, don’t have a lot of time to waste on a fixer-upper. Nor is it not fair to ask them to.

But I was needy. I needed to feel wanted. I needed to feel the possibility of not being alone. And I needed to be distracted from the constant loop in my head. I was a vampire who satisfied these needs at the expense of others.

I wasn’t fit for dating duty, but I kept signing up. Which is how I found myself in the Sunshine State one Thanksgiving several years ago scrapping metal for money with a sexy, charming woman I met in New York. She had a sarcastic, world-weary wit and a great ass. So, we kept in email correspondence for months. She lived in Florida and invited me out. Oh, and she was also a mid-level pill junkie. I hadn’t given up my sobriety, but water seeks its own level and my self-esteem had plummeted to new depths. As I stood there in an abandoned industrial lot during a light rain, earnestly pulling copper and tin from window screens that she and her friends would cash in for pills, the sense that I had jumped into the wrong movie was overwhelming.

She eventually got her act together and so did I. But only after I wasted a lot of people’s time, including my own, trying to assuage my emptiness. Nothing I tried worked. It mostly just made me and others feel badly.

Then, eventually, I did what I should have done in the first place. I stopped trying to fix the problem. The real issue wasn’t whether or not I was going to be lonely for the rest of my life. It was what was I going to do with the rest of my life.

I got busy and started pouring my energy into something I’d been dreaming about for more than a decade—starting a Paris Review-like literary publication with a uniquely Los Angeles flavor. Pretty soon, I felt inspired again.

It’s funny what following a dream can do. This one led me to my wife.