There are many things nobody tells you about divorce.
How quiet the house becomes.
How strange it feels to fill out a form and check divorced.
How you will suddenly need to learn things your spouse always handled.
And how, approximately eleven seconds after people discover you are single, every unattached man you’ve encountered since 2004 will apparently receive some sort of emergency notification.
SHE’S AVAILABLE.
They came from everywhere.
Single men I already knew. My ex’s coworkers. His friends. Friends’ exes. Younger brothers of people I’d gone to high school with.
Men I hadn’t heard from in years suddenly emerged from the mist like they’d been patiently waiting for my marriage to expire.
Even my childhood stalker resurfaced to inform me that his love had, in fact, endured.
Wonderful.
Exactly what every newly divorced woman hopes to discover.
I had been with the same person since I was fifteen years old.
Fifteen.
The last time I was single, I had braces, Facebook didn’t exist, and my understanding of courtship was essentially whether a boy called your parents’ landline after 7 p.m.
I had never dated.
Not really.
So there I was, a grown woman with children and nearly two decades of relationship experience, entering the dating world with roughly the romantic street smarts of a Victorian child.
Naturally, my married friends found this entertaining.
They convinced me I needed dating apps.
“It’s the only way people meet now.”
I resisted.
They persisted.
Eventually I made the catastrophic decision to give them complete freedom over my profile.
I went to sleep single.
I woke up employed by Hinge.
There were men everywhere. Swipe left. Swipe right. Match.
Hello.
Hey beautiful.
What are you looking for?
What are you looking for?
What do you do for fun?
Do you have kids?
Have you always been this beautiful?
Would you like to see my penis?
Apparently that last one required significantly less conversational groundwork than I had anticipated.
I received my first unsolicited dick pic.
Then another.
And another.
Men, a small public service announcement: Don’t.
And if you’re going to ignore that advice, you should at minimum possess the self-awareness to determine whether what you’re about to distribute warrants a surprise unveiling.
Most of the time, it does not.
Dating became a second job.
For a while, I approached it with the enthusiasm of someone making up for almost twenty years of missed coursework.
I dated for fun, I dated intentionally and I dated because I was bored on a Thursday.
There were weeks I stacked dates like appointments.
Breakfast.
Lunch.
Dinner.
At one point I was less a woman looking for love and more a restaurant critic with abandonment issues.
My married friends lived for it.
Every gathering began with some variation of:
“Okay. What happened now?”
And I always had material.
I learned about love bombing.
I met the honorary fuckboy.
I encountered enough narcissistic tendencies to briefly consider handing out diagnostic questionnaires before appetizers.
I gave up.
Downloaded another app.
Gave up on that app.
Redownloaded the first app.
Declared I was done with men.
Met a man.
Repeated.
Eventually I met one who seemed different.
He knew exactly what to say.
Our stories mirrored each other in almost eerie ways. He understood betrayal. He understood raising children after a relationship ended. He understood the particular bruises left behind when someone you trusted rearranges your understanding of love.
It felt like being understood.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be more of a script.
Thanks to one of those Facebook groups women join when dating has become so dangerous that we apparently need a civilian intelligence agency, I discovered there were others.
Several others.
Women receiving the same stories. The same vulnerability. The same promises. The same carefully constructed man.
Whenever he mysteriously disappeared, apparently, he wasn’t busy. He was with contestant number four.
We all eventually found one another and started a group chat to compare notes.
We were all single mothers.
We had all experienced betrayal.
We had all been approached through the exact wounds that made us most likely to believe him.
And, in perhaps the creepiest detail, we all looked like we could have attended the same family reunion.
The man had a type.
Gross.
A few phone calls later, the universe received some assistance delivering karma.
That story deserves its own rainy day.
After hearing enough of these disasters, my sister finally staged an intervention.
“Get off the apps.”
I agreed.
“You need to meet someone organically.”
Sure.
“Like at the grocery store.”
Fine.
I deleted the apps.
The very next day, I went grocery shopping.
I was standing in produce squeezing and smelling tomatoes because I needed a few beautifully overripe ones for homemade sauce.
A man beside me commented that a tomato was a tomato.
I gave him the polite awkward laugh women have perfected for situations in which we’re unsure whether we’re being flirted with or someone is simply passionate about produce.
I continued shopping and then I saw him again.
Seafood.
I was buying frozen crab legs.
He was waiting for an actual crab.
Fresh.
Naturally, this led to a joke about why things could never work between us: he preferred ripe tomatoes and fresh seafood.
Okay.
That was funny and he was cute.
He introduced himself.
Ryan.
I introduced myself.
Tina.
We shook hands and that was it.
No number. No last name. No social media.
I drove the three minutes home.
By the time I had unloaded my groceries, there was a message waiting for me.
“Hi! It’s Crab Leg Ryan! Is this the right Tina I met a few minutes ago?”
A little creepy? Absolutely.
But also…
Was this it?
My meet-cute?
Had my sister spoken it into existence?
Had the universe finally looked down upon my collection of fuckboys and love bombers and said, She’s suffered enough. Send in the produce aisle.
I agreed to coffee.
Crab Leg Ryan was in his late thirties.
He had three children.
He lived in his mother’s basement.
He was between jobs.
This was intentional because he had decided it was finally time to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a rapper.
I wish I were embellishing this for comedic effect.
I am not.
I also wish I could tell you I did not sit in the middle of a public coffee shop while a grown man spit beats at me.
I did.
So did several innocent civilians who had simply gone out for coffee that Sunday and did not consent to becoming an audience.
I drove home with one clear thought:
Maybe love isn’t for everyone.
I started imagining another kind of life.
Maybe I would travel.
Build a beautiful home.
Fill it with friends and my children and things I loved.
Maybe I’d never experience great romance.
And maybe that could still be a great life.
What I didn’t realize was that while I had been swiping through half the city, interrogating strangers over appetizers and being serenaded by Crab Leg Ryan…
someone had been there all along.
We’ll call him “A”.
We had onboarded at work together.
I knew he was beautiful.
I also knew he was eleven years younger than me, so I filed that observation neatly under:
Absolutely fucking not.
“A” disagreed.
For nearly two years.
He listened to every dating catastrophe.
Every disappointment.
Every declaration that I was officially finished with men and his interest didn’t fade.
Infuriatingly, it grew.
I became extremely good at rejecting him.
I knew what this was.
I had TikTok.
Cougars.
Older-woman fantasies.
Maybe some sort of mommy issue I had neither the qualifications nor the desire to unpack.
No, thank you.
He could be handsome and kind and interesting somewhere safely outside the realm of possibility.
Eleven years.
Different cultures.
Different religions.
Different stages of life.
And me?
I came with children, history, scar tissue and enough emotional baggage to incur an overweight luggage fee.
There were too many reasons it shouldn’t work.
So I never really considered the possibility that it could.
Lucky for me, “A” is stubborn.
While I was busy searching for some perfect combination of compatibility boxes, he had apparently decided he would simply wait for me to get out of my own way.
And eventually, I did.
Dating after divorce taught me plenty.
It taught me that love bombing isn’t love.
That shared trauma isn’t necessarily intimacy.
That chemistry doesn’t equal character.
That a man locating your social media within seven minutes of meeting you is not automatically destiny.
That some dreams should remain hobbies.
And that no woman should ever have to listen to an unsolicited freestyle before finishing her coffee.
But mostly, dating taught me something I hadn’t expected.
I had spent so much time trying to figure out how to find love that I hadn’t noticed how differently I needed to understand it.
For most of my life, love had been one person.
Then suddenly love became swipes and matches and sparks and red flags and butterflies and stories I desperately wanted to believe.
I thought I needed to learn how to date.
What I really needed to learn was how to choose.
How to recognize consistency instead of intensity.
How to stop confusing being pursued with being valued.
How to let someone know me without auditioning for the role of a woman worth loving.
And perhaps most importantly, how to build a life so full that love could become something added to it rather than something required to complete it.
The apps didn’t teach me that.
The narcissists certainly didn’t.
Crab Leg Ryan didn’t either, although he did teach me that I apparently prefer my seafood frozen and my rappers professionally employed.
In the end, there wasn’t some cinematic meet-cute.
There was just someone who kept showing up while I was busy looking everywhere else.
Maybe that’s the funniest part.
After nearly twenty years without a single first date, I threw myself into modern dating determined to make up for lost time.
I survived the apps.
I survived the dick pics.
I survived the love bombers.
I survived an aspiring basement rapper.
And after all that searching, love had the audacity to have been sitting beside me at work the whole damn time.