Tamsen Fadal - The New Single: Finding, Fixing, and Falling Back in Love with Yourself After a Breakup or Divorce

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I AM DEDICATING THIS BOOK TO MY DAD. THE MAN WHO TAUGHT ME TRUE LOVE.

How to love, why to love, and why its okay to love again.

I try to live his words and his faith daily so that they may take me to the same place of happiness he has known, including his life with my late mother who never had the chance to see me grow into a woman I hope she would be proud of.

Its better to be alone, than lonely with someone.

D AD

In 2007, I was married in The New York Times .

In 2012, I was divorced in the New York Post .

Not exactly a Cinderella story, but it is my story. In this flawed fairy tale, Prince Charming and I ran a matchmaking business. A young couple, married and in love, helping other people find love. What could be more perfect? To top off the romance, we wrote two books together teaching women how to date. Why Hasnt He Called? was the first, followed by Why Hasnt He Proposed? When the story of our divorce hit the papers, the joke was that our third title should be Why Didnt I Leave Sooner? There were many nights that I asked myself that very questionbut I wasnt laughing.

There are many things I learned from co-running a matchmaking business. Everyone wants to find the one . Everyone thinks about it, talks about it, dreams about it, and even pays for itboth literally and metaphorically. Most people are also willing to do just about whatever it takes to find and hold on to the one . If and when things go wrong, no one seems to know what to do next. Youre not supposed to want to start over in your thirties, forties, or fifties, so the marriage experts dont usually put that part in the manual. I know we didnt.

Because my divorce played out in an embarrassingly, mortifyingly, nauseatingly public spectacle, I found that I had to take control of my suddenly single new life in a hurry. I had to learn that being a newly divorced woman brought out all sorts of craziness in myself, my friends, and in the men I eventually started dating. Everyone had advice for me. Some of it was quite good and some of it was simply dreadful. It was up to me to sift through endless, and sometimes hurtful, suggestions about how to live my new life and decide what made sense for me. Ive written this book to share what I learned from others and my own experiences about starting over in the twenty-first century. I wrote this book especially because I came to understand the importance of regaining your emotional, intellectual, and physical wholeness if you want to successfully recover from a divorce.

Think about it. You were one-half of a couple before you were divorced. You saw yourself as a part of a larger whole, but that whole no longer exists. Who you become now is up to you. Will it be your own true fully actualized self, or a diminished version of the person you could and should be? I hope you will choose the former path, as I did. This book is here to help you along the way. I didnt tell most of my friends or any of my coworkers about my separation. I lost weight. I never slept. I wasnt myself. I cried a lot. I kept to myself. People thought I was upset because I was over forty and trying to have a baby. Little did they know the reason for my private anguish: the end of my marriage.

Then, I got Page Sixed.

In May 2012, the New York Post printed the first details of my divorce. Then came one article after another. If the first one was bad, the next few were rock bottom: details about our bickering and our blowups, my ex-husbands other alleged woman and, as Page Six put it, his other, other woman.

On one particularly painful night, I was master of ceremonies at a star-studded event. In between my hosting duties, and conversations with celebs I was bringing onstage that night, I was fielding e-mails and phone calls from the press while bawling my eyes out in the corner because I knew that more lurid, personal details were about to be made public. The next morning at the television station people were gathered around the newly delivered newspaper, reading about the lowest point of my life. It was understandable. It was shocking and unexpected to them. And because I had done such a good job of keeping my private life hidden, the details made public were that much more exciting to people, and devastating to me.

Thats when I realized my marriage was not going to avoid being a statistic. After a lot of tears, fake smiles to cover the pain, rude questions from curious parties, and bank accounts that werent nearly as balanced as they used to befrom mediators to separate apartments to the slashing in half of a once-shared businessI realized I had to face the fact that I was no longer a we, and I was back to being just me.

But who was I?

There hadnt been a me in a very long time. It had been years since I had functioned as a singular unit. Dinners, parties, holidays, even nights alone on the couch hadnt actually been nights alone. He had been there, even when I didnt necessarily want him to be. But having someone seemed easier than having no one. I had no idea how to be by myself. If only I had had an experienced, honest, and impartial voice to offer up advice about surviving this emotional train wreck.

Because I ran a matchmaking business in New York City, I had no shortage of opinions about the single life, from both the male and female perspectives. I had clear proof that there were available guys out there, but in my post-divorce personal apocalypse, I had absolutely no interest in dating any of them. Instead, I chose to do what many women do following a breakup or divorce: I went back to an old flame. My first love, to be exact, and the polar opposite of my ex-husband: Professor Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle. The man who taught me how to travel, cook, enjoy fine wine, and experience the world. The one that I thought got away. The one that wouldnt commit to me when I was younger. And, as it turned out, the one who wouldnt commit to me later, either. Of course, Eliza outgrows Higgins, too. So, there I was, going to extremes, repeating one toxic pattern in order to avoid repeating another. This was not progress.

When I did finally start to date new men, because of my years in the matchmaking business, you would think that I would go out with nothing but Manhattans most amazing bachelors. You would think. But, you would be wrong. For all the matches I had made, I knew what most of the people sitting across the table from me were made of, but I wasnt certain what I was made of anymore. Since then, I have spoken with countless women who felt the same way after their separations: disillusioned, and lost.

You name a twisted marriage scenario or dating nightmare, Ive lived it. But havent we all? From the stay-at-home mom who lost her husband to a younger woman, to Gwyneth Paltrows conscious uncoupling, whether we were publicly shamed or privately embarrassed, all of our stories are the same, even when all of our stories are unique. There are plenty of books out there about dating. I wrote a couple of them. This is not another one of those books.

When I was twenty-three years old, packing up my car and heading off to my first job in television news in Oak Hill, West Virginia, my father gave me some love advice. He told me, Its better to be alone than lonely with someone. Quite frankly, the sentence made no sense to me. It wasnt until I was coming out of my divorce did I realize exactly what my father was talking about. I had been lonely with someone, but I had refused to see it. This book is about learning the difference and learning to cherish your own company. Only then do you even have a chance at being happy with someone else.