I took a trip early in my singlehood to a place that will forever be on my list of beautiful vacation destinations: Sun Valley, an Idaho resort town where I’d never been before.
But the difference about this getaway from the others I’d taken since my divorce?
It was my first foray outside my comfort zone with a man–a straight, single man whom I met through mutual friends.
We had emailed and talked on the phone for months, so I knew he was who he said he was, and that I wasn’t heading into an ax-murderer situation that some of my friends fretted about. Still, it was a big ol' leap for me to commit to spending time alone with someone that I'd met face-to-face only once.
I was hopeful that this new guy, I'll call him JR, and I would vibe together, as the millennials call it, in the stunning townhouse he'd rented on the banks of the Wood River with its soothing "whoosh" coming through the open windows like a lullaby.
As my bff Jack says, "If everyone comes home from a trip and nobody lost an eye, it’s a success."
And JR and I did come down from that mountain retreat with eyes and limbs intact. But I wasn’t prepared for the cascade of emotions and reverberations from my past that went up that mountain with me–and came back down with both of us.
JR is a sweet, thoughtful and calm individual who’d been divorced a couple of years longer than me. The difference is that the end of his marriage was a fleeting skirmish, while mine was akin to Hiroshima. And therein lies the problem–the nuclear burn is still there, but not visible, lurking just below the skin.
Much to my surprise, during a candid conversation with JR after a couple glasses of wine, the stinging pain of my annihilated marriage came out of nowhere as I exposed one after
another scorched wound to the crisp mountain air.
There were moments during the trip where JR would reach out to hold my hand or drape his arm across my shoulders and pull me toward him for a little hug, and I felt protected and peaceful…and other times where the same motions triggered balls to the wall panic, making me want to escape to another world where I could just--be alone.
This vacation was as chaste as a virgin margarita, hold the salt. From our separate bedrooms, romance for me was DOA.
But JR felt a spark, and a few days in, he mentioned the M word and living together and–whoaaaa sister. I just wish I could have seen my face as my eyebrows arched so high they nearly climbed off my forehead.
Even if I’d felt the same, the talk of matrimony and a mortgage would have left me shaken. I’ve said dozens of times since my final standoff in divorce court that I know
one thing for sure: I’ll never marry again.
And until some months later, a winning lotto ticket wouldn’t be enough to change my forever single dating status. But something happened about 10,000 miles as the crow flies across the ocean in Budapest along another river. A Danube cruise with 100 of my travel buddies from the desert stirred something that I thought died the day a broken version of myself faced a civil court judge, and I saw my ex-husband for the last time.
Surrounded by couples on the night that was billed as the romantic "Illuminations cruise," I bolted off the top deck and back to my cabin as soon as the golden lights from the ornate castles hugging the river's banks shimmered and danced on the tranquil water. Everywhere I looked, I saw couples kissing, but I wanted to experience all that with one person, not dozens: I wanted that shared secret feeling where I say, “Remember when we…,” and he finishes the sentence, recalling that exact moment, sealed in time for just us two.
If I had a hormone left in my body, I’d scratch it up to an imbalance. But this felt fresh and real, like a tiny door cracked open after being nailed shut by time and decay.
On my last day in Budapest, I sat on a bench in Liberty Square to devour a flaky sandwich whose contents weren’t exactly as expected; surely something was lost in translation. Although I felt a deep satisfaction thinking about the magnificent sights I'd seen, I couldn't shake the aloneness I experienced that night on the ship's top deck until I was in flight back to the U.S.
It was somewhere over the north Atlantic, unable to fall asleep, that I thought for the first time about the possibility of a future where I open my arms just enough to embrace a long-term romantic partner. Would I ever be brave enough to let a man get that close to me, scorched parts and all?
And I decide if I can find the guy who stays the course without flinching, who looks in my eyes and says, "I see you, I hear you," there's a good chance I'll believe him.