What Happened to Eden

As any woman who is staring into the gaping maw of the future is wont to do – I looked for a distraction. As a married person I never looked at other men. Seriously. When my sister wanted to go to Las Vegas to Thunder From Down Under I felt like I was cheating on my husband. Later he would school me on cheating, obviously, but that was my level of intolerance for shady behavior.

I didn’t post full body photos of myself online. If a male professional contacted me via text to work on the house I would try to schedule it for when my husband would be working from home. When I was connected with the man who bought our old house and he had questions about our security system, I referred him to my husband because exchanging a lot of texts with a man seemed untoward, even though it was completely harmless. I didn’t want even the appearance of a conflict.

When I realized I would be reentering the dating pool at thirty-eight, I didn’t even know what single men my age were like. What do other men look like when they’re around forty? What kind of jobs do they have? How do they handle dating and coparenting, if they have kids? What does it mean if they’re forty and have never been married?

I joined a dating app, just to see for myself. Plus, I was fairly sure I was hideous and broken and no one would want a recently divorced mom of three. I wanted the app to prove me right – show me zero matches and crazy dudes who hate kids and think I’m ugly.

Within a day or so of finding out your husband has been cheating on you, you should absolutely not join a dating app. This is not advice I would give to anyone. On the one hand, getting matches and messages and digital roses can lift your spirits which are currently digging below rock bottom. On the other hand, you can’t actually go on a date.

I was living with my cheating husband and three kids. I knew I’d be moving soon. I had to pack the house and make real life decisions and all I could think was will I be alone forever? My husband seemed to find it impossible to stay with me, so I assumed I was permanently undesirable. I took some selfies and set up a profile, and started getting messages immediately. Something about new blood in a mid-sized city, I’m sure.

It was a confidence boost, but also alarming. Strange men can’t know my personal information, that seems dangerous, right? For all the things my husband was, he was never violent, but a lot of men are, and you don’t know until it’s too late. Was it even safe to meet someone in person?

More importantly, after spending ten years as a stay at home mom with a husband who barely talked to me, did I know how to talk to adults? A year before I had met my sister in a bar, which was highly unusual for me as I rarely left the house without my children, and I asked the bartender for “bubble water” instead of sparkling water or club soda because that’s what my kids called it. Dating was going to be a lot of similar missteps, I was sure.

Some men were creeps. Some were definitely cheating on their wives. Some immediately wanted my phone number to get me off the app. Some would send one cutesy message and then ghost. And some wanted to set up a date after exchanging bland greetings. It was at that moment that I tossed my phone on the bed and backed away. Meet a man in person? Talk without spell check and a moment to reread my message? Pretend to be interested in a new person’s dumb hobbies or boring job? Bleh. No thanks.

The most difficult time of day were the hours between my kids’ bedtime and my bedtime, so that became the designated time to answer messages from the app and talk to strangers. I had to practice feigning interest in people before I took this experiment live. There was one person in particular I really liked, and we started texting every night before bed. We had a lot in common, which was a revelation for me after so long with someone like my husband, who barely tolerated the things I liked. He was a good listener, and extremely smart. But instead of using his brains to belittle me, he used his powers to be witty and funny.

I never ended up meeting this person in real life, but we chatted for weeks. I finally told him I was officially relocating and things naturally died off, but he checks in every couple months. It’s entirely possible we wouldn’t have hit it off in person, but he gave me a lot of hope in those dark first weeks. Maybe someday I’d find a person who shared my interests and didn’t put me down or tell me so many lies. The bar was low, to be sure, but maybe I’d find a partner who exceeded my expectations someday.

I thought about my husband, who didn’t want to work through our issues and was continuing a relationship with his mistress while sharing a home with his wife and kids, albeit from the guest room. He was trying to avoid me, which just reinforced how useless he’d become while being home and not lifting a finger to help with the kids or meals or basic upkeep and chores – things were the same, I just didn’t see his face. I decided I didn’t want to live with him under my roof, so the next morning I told him to leave.

And he did.