Stella Grey - Mid-Life Ex-Wife: A Diary of Divorce, Online Dating, and Second Chance

The end of my marriage was an event that came suddenly and unexpectedly. It was rather like that scene in Alien, in which John Hurt is sitting contentedly eating spaghetti with the spacecraft crew, and then the infant monster bursts out of his chest, leaving everybody shocked and splattered. My ex-husband fell in love with someone else, and thats that. I can say And thats that now, but Im not going to pretend it didnt take time and a lot of ups and downs to get here, to the point at which Im able to use three words. At the time it didnt feel real; wed been married a long time; and then, when I started online dating, hoping to be cheered up, things became even more surreal. Life got quite Alice in Wonderland, as you will see. The journey I tookand I do think of it as a journeywas weird, hilarious, difficult, mind-boggling, nerve-racking and ultimately... (but Im not going to spoil it for you). I dated online for almost two years, and it isnt an exaggeration to say that it shaped the person I am now, a different person in various ways to the person I was. In many ways I like her better than the old me.

Dating was a strong medicine taken in the hopes of softening the corners of a desperate sadness. It wasnt easy, drawing the line that ended the married years and declaring myself to be single. It wasnt that I bypassed the heavy drinking phase. When somebody announces that theyre leaving you, its a physical shock. It starts in your brain and reverberates through your bones. It might feel like being told you have a terminal illness (when in fact its usually highly treatable, and in time youll get better). First there is denial, and then there is rage, and then there is acceptance. Denial is parasitical and tries to colonize you, and the rage that follows is like a baby cuckoo, perpetually hungry, and then theres acceptance, when you begin to want to make the best of getting up in the morning and carrying on. Renewal might follow. Renewal is a painful experience. It means being properly alive again, and trusting and vulnerable, and that can hurt.

There came a point, having healed sufficiently, having moved on from the daytime vodka phasedaytime vodka while eating whole tubs of ice cream and crying over property search programs (its distressing to be a clich, but there you are)at which I thought, So now what? So now what? is a good sign. It marks the first day of looking forward, and not back. Im not saying I stopped harking back, but I began to look ahead and think about what might happen next. Id always imagined the future would be shared with my husband, and now there were many other roads, forking off, over hill and dale and into the unknown. It occurred to me for the first time that I might not be unhappy for the rest of my life. I realized that it was all in my hands. I ditched the vodka, the dairy products stacked in the freezer and daytime television. I had a haircut and color, bought a dress and went to the bookshop. I sat on a park bench with my books in a bag (not all of them self-help, either), tilting my face up to the early spring sunshine, and decided that I needed to meet new people, and by people I mean men.

The world was full of couples and I wanted to be half of one of them. That was the mission. It was my own diagnosis of what I needed. I was heartbroken and needed a fix. I needed a heartfix. The world was full of couples busy being casually happy with one another. The young ones didnt trouble me, the kind who canoodled in cinema queues. But the midlife ones really bothered me, and particularly the silver-haired, affluent couples holding hands in the street. There was a prime example in the coffee shop where I used to hang out at the weekend, a pair who were just back from holiday. They were talking about how much they were missing island light and their swimming pool. She was wearing the bracelet hed bought her, and it was turquoise against her tanned arm. The non-affluent retired bothered me too: the world was full of ordinary untanned, badly dressed, unattractive older couples who had every intention of being together till they died, and I began to find that simple loyalty overpoweringly moving. Heartbreak felt constantly hormonal, like persistent PMS. I was having trouble feeling sensible about the odds of finding somebody who would feel as natural and right at my side as my husband once had. But I needed to do something, even if it turned out just to be a phase on the way to being happy to live on my own.