Dating After Divorce Wasn't What They Said It'd Be
By Lyz Lenz
It didn’t take long after I ended my 12-year marriage for me to get on Tinder. I’d met my ex-husband in high school; he was the third person I ever dated; and we’d been married since we were 22. I wanted to know what was out there. And, if I am being very honest, I wanted to have sex. Really good sex.
The first profile I saw said, “No single moms” in the bio. So did the next one. “Women who just want men to take care of them and their spawn swipe left,” read another.
I closed the app.
I did not end my marriage because I hoped that I would find some new man to take my husband’s place. I was not trading in models. My kids had a father and they didn’t need another one. I had gotten divorced simply because I had come to understand that I could be happy or I could be married. I chose happiness.
In the aftermath of my divorce, as I sat in my rented home, put together cheap furniture and ate shredded cheese over the sink, delirious about all the changes in my life, I craved sex and intimacy. But getting back out there meant dating again for the first time in 15 years. And now, I was a single mother of two and my body had changed.
I’ve never backed down from a challenge, though, and I was curious what it would be like to actually date. So I started swiping and making plans. I was always honest: I didn’t want a new husband; I wanted hook-ups, hang-outs, and fun. I had kids, yes, but they were, as my kids would say, “nunya” — meaning nunya business. I expected it to be difficult. But it was actually really easy.
According to Reddit and the men on Twitter who’d pop into my replies and DMs, I was a low-value woman. They said that no one would want me and I should have stayed married. I had been told as a single, middle-aged mother, I was unattractive and a burden. But when I started dating, I found quite the opposite was true.
I dated doctors, lawyers, and politicians a decade younger than me. I dated a professional athlete who had once dated a very famous woman, and I felt honored by the association. This time around, I wasn’t dating to find the next best thing. I had the best thing, and that was myself. I’d pulled myself from an unhappy life and discovered joy in a glass of wine, a detective show, and a bowl of pasta. It was glorious. The bar for men wasn’t the last good-enough guy, the bar was myself.
I learned to walk out on dates that were a waste of my time. I carried cash. When a man would offer a snide comment about my desirability, or remark on a ticking biological clock, I’d laugh. “I’m perfectly hot,” I’d say, much to their astonishment. “I know that.”
Our culture loves to tell women they have a shelf life. Botox, makeup, and fillers are among the preserving liquids of our swiftly waning beauty. We contort ourselves into all sorts of ways to fit a narrow, white, patriarchal standard of desirability. It’s a capitalist cycle that traps us trying to attain the unattainable. Be hot but not too hot. Be beautiful but never know it. Always be trying to erase from your face those lines and signs of a life lived. An eternal girlhood of the spotless skin. It’s exhausting. It’s also a lie. As noted by Tressie McMillan Cottom, “beauty is supposed to serve power’s interests.” But when that beauty is claimed by a person outside of those strict boundaries, it threatens power.
“People are much freer than they imagine,” states the writer Marilynne Robinson in a New York Times interview. She is talking about narrative and storytelling, but she is also talking about life.
She explains about the cultural assumptions her students come into class with. The stories and lives they think they need to describe and tell. “A lot of freedom is curtailed by people assuming that their freedom is curtailed,” she says.
The narratives we believe are powerful. They shape our lives. But we can also choose to believe something else. We can write new stories. We can shape for ourselves new lives.
I wasn’t particularly confident about myself when I began swiping, but I had nothing to lose. If I was rejected, so what? I spent so many years feeling bad about myself. Judging my body in the mirror. Dressing to cover up my flaws. And I was tired. I was done making apologies for who I was, the life I lived and the way it showed on my body. I simply refuse to hate myself anymore.
Date me or don’t, I’d tell men, but I wouldn’t be ashamed.