Second Chances—A Love Story
“I see you married a younger woman,” I said, giving Albert a cheeky wink. I had met Albert and his wife Phoebe only moments before and was, as nurses do, diving into the most intimate parts of their humanity–assessing him head to toe, coaching them through scary diagnoses and invasive tests. It is sacred space, nursing, and these were the moments that reminded me of that.
At the time, I was navigating the rocky road to divorce after 22 years of marriage. Though I fancy myself an optimist, it was a dark and difficult time and it seemed like everyday was a new trauma. Meanwhile, I was working full-time, mothering four sweet children, struggling to pay the bills, and trying to maintain my sanity.
Albert and I were face to face, him holding onto my forearms and me walking backwards to steady him as he made the long journey from hospital bed to bathroom. His expression instantly changed as he realized I was teasing him. He had been sullen, dull, his face downcast. But when I gently ribbed him about his obviously much younger wife, he smiled and looked over at her. They exchanged a flirtatious knowing, a secret special something. They both immediately warmed up to me.
“Yes, I did,” Albert replied, standing a little taller, his whole countenance brightening up, a little pep lightening his step. Albert was 85 years old and his wife was twenty years younger. “She was my secretary,” he explained, a mischievous sparkle in his eye. His wife blushed, her eyelashes fluttering down. “We were both divorced, she had two young children.”
“He accepted them like they were his own,” Phoebe said tenderly.
“How long have you been married?” I asked.
“Thirty-six years,” his wife replied, her eyes glowing with pride and tenderness. They went on to tell me their love story, like so many before them had. The bittersweet mixture of devotion and illness was palpable, but the love between them was alive and well. I hung on every word.
It was a beautiful moment, one that I hungered for. It will always be one of my most treasured memories of being a nurse. It was often the case, when I cared for an older patient whose spouse was keeping vigil at the bedside, that it was their second marriage. After all, more than half of marriages end in divorce. So it follows that many of those divorces lead to second marriages. It was also often the case that they had a very obvious, special bond and that their love had stayed strong through 30+ years. That sounds like a long time, but when you count back from 80 years, that means they met in their 50s. A second chance. I probed, not only in an attempt to create a rapport, but also because I was desperate to know…is there hope that I might love again? Can there still be a happy ending for me?
I wasn’t sure. After many very difficult years and copious tears, I was jaded. I hated love songs and thought that epic love stories were just for the movies. Besides that, I felt so much anger that I couldn’t imagine opening my heart to a man again. At the time, all I cared about was finding peace of mind and as far as I could see, that didn’t involve a man.
That peace of mind finally came in the Spring of 2020 and I nestled into it like an eagle making a new home, stick by hard earned stick. I bought a home on my own, something that I wouldn’t have thought possible a few years before. My children and I moved in, breathing a sigh of relief to have a space of our own and not be at the mercy of a landlord. My bedroom was finally a refuge and I felt the most contentment I had ever felt in my life. Alone. I leaned into that aloneness like Bilbo Baggins in his hobbit hole. “Go away! Nobody’s home!”
My alone moments were still far and few between, what with work and my children and my mom and sister, who were also living with me at the time. But to be able to go to my room and shut the door, knowing that it was my space and my space alone, was golden.
I had several acquaintances who had gotten divorced around the same time and all of them, including my ex-husband, dove into dating headfirst while the divorce papers were still hot off the press. I, on the other hand, was mapping out my life for indefinite voluntary solitary living, emphatically saying, “NO!” to every question like, “are you interested in dating?” or “I have a friend you might like to meet.”
I could not imagine bringing a man into my life or the lives of my children. Ours was sacred space and I was defending it like I was Queen of Solitude Island, building impenetrable walls around our little kingdom and around my heart.
I spent a year this way. And I loved it. When I walked into my quiet bedroom at night, I felt a palpable calm that was a long time coming and not to be taken for granted. I was healing at the soul level. For the first time in my life, I knew my own mind and heart and had the autonomy to take heed.
I might have stayed this way forever, except that little by little the cells of my body started whispering that they were feeling deprived of human touch. My kids were all teenagers at that point and gone were the days of being overstimulated with toddler cuddles and baby flesh. I was lucky if I could get a two second, side angled hug from my busy teens. They were getting more and more independent by the minute and were often gone at school, sports practices, or with friends. Being the introvert that I am, I wasn’t desperately lonely. But in my quiet moments, I did feel the start of a craving for the company and touch of a man.
I mostly pushed these thoughts to the back of my mind and lived vicariously through Outlander binges. But one fateful night, I found myself at home, kids gone with friends. I thought to myself, “Self–maybe we should just get an idea of what men our age look like.” I googled, “best dating apps” and read through a few articles. O Magazine said Match was their first choice and when Oprah speaks, I follow. I signed up for the free version. I didn’t plan to “like” anyone. “Just looking,” I said. In order to just look, however, you do have to create a profile. I posted a couple casual pics with zero personal details. To my astonishment, within a few minutes my profile started gathering “likes” and messages. They kept coming in, one after another, but I couldn’t see who any of them were from unless I paid for a subscription. Initially I refused, not wanting to spend the money and feeling too chicken to venture into the crazy dating app world.
But the “likes” and messages kept adding up. My mom and I were laughing, seeing the number steadily climb as the evening wore on. I’ll admit, my self esteem bumped up a notch. Finally, my mom said, “Oh come on, sign up. I’ll pay for it!” At first, I declined. “Nope, I’m just looking.” But by the end of the evening, I couldn’t contain my curiosity. My mom paid for a one month subscription and things kind of snowballed from there.
I had to work the next day and I still hadn’t answered anyone. Over the course of the 12-hour shift, the other nurses kept stealing my phone and checking out the guys who had sent me messages. By the end of the shift, the girls had narrowed down a few choices for me and helped me craft my first message.
It was to Stephen.
I still had a very firm commitment to “the plan” in my mind. It was a one month subscription. I was just going to dip my toes in the dating pool and then scurry back up to safe ground, hole up again in my solitude.
All I can say is, sometimes the universe has a different plan.
Now at this point, I feel like I need to make a disclaimer.
“Results Not Guaranteed!”
I don’t have a formula for finding love. This is not a step-by-step guide to finding your “one”. There is a book called Calling in the One by Katherine Woodward Thomas, which I read. Woodward includes her own story of finding her “one”. She wrote another book called Conscious Uncoupling, which I also read. I read Conscious Uncoupling first, while I was getting divorced, and then I read Calling in the One when I was single. You might think that’s the order she wrote them in, but no. She wrote Conscious Uncoupling second and includes her story of divorce from the very same person she wrote about in Calling in the One.
Life simply doesn’t come with any guarantees. As far as I know, there is no cosmic or spiritual promise that there is a “Match” out there for everyone or that your relationship will last forever. I definitely didn’t believe in the idea of “soul mates” before meeting Stephen and I’m still not sure that concept is something people should pin their hopes on. I apologize if I’ve offended the hopeless romantics out there and if you’re a hopeless romantic, by all means cling to that hope. I think it's a beautiful thing to hope for. I’m still in awe that this happened to me. I want to say that it’s possible for everyone, but I have too many friends who are single or unhappily married to be unrealistic about this. I mean just look at Brangelina. C’mon—I was sure they were soulmates! Ok seriously though, I promise I’m not trying to be a voice of discouragement here. I’m a bonafide optimist. I guess I’m just saying that I can’t make any promises. Neither life, nor Match, comes with a money-back guarantee.
Back to the story.
I went into that month expecting it to be horrible. My ex-husband and friends had warned me to be careful and watch out for myself. I expected to meet jerk after jerk after jerk, and just have it be an exercise in confirming all the pessimistic things I believed about love and men.
But I was blindsided in all the best ways. I only ended up needing that subscription for one month after all. Stephen swept me off my feet. I was high on dopamine and adrenaline and floated around with a cheesy, delirious grin on my face (so my coworkers told me).
One early morning, I was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for my daughter’s lunch. She walked into the kitchen and accusingly said, “What?”
“What?” I repeated back to her.
“You’re smiling.”
“Oh, am I?” I said, blushing. She shrugged, gave me a teenage “grown ups are so weird” eyeroll, and stuffed the sandwich into her backpack. I went on with my day—floating, smiling.
I feel corny saying it, but Stephen and I both knew fairly quickly that we had found our person. To me, it felt like he had always been nearby, like I had just been facing the wrong direction and when I finally turned around, it was like, “Oh! There you are!” Suddenly, every love song made sense and I happily, gratefully admitted to being wrong–epic love stories do exist, it’s not just in the movies.
Stephen Says—
“When Melanie stepped out of her car, I thought to myself—how can I get this girl to marry me?”
I don’t share our story to make people who haven’t found love feel bad. I don’t have a magic formula other than that I had worked hard to get to a place of being very balanced and confident and content. I think there is something about that concept, which is the basic premise of Calling in the One and for this blog. I think that getting to a really good place in your own development attracts good things into your life. I believe that the people we attract into our lives are a reflection of ourselves and our personal progress. I sometimes feel sad that I didn’t find Stephen sooner, but I also know that when I was twenty-nothing, I wasn’t ready to find the love of my life. I wasn’t the person I needed to be in order to attract that kind of love. I am grateful for all the life lessons I learned during my first marriage. Those lessons helped me grow into the person that I am now. They were hard lessons, but that’s often how life is—some of our hardest lessons provide the most growth. Everything that has happened in my life helped prepare me to receive this kind of love into my heart. It is a mature love that is wiser and more stable because I am wiser and more stable.
I suppose that sums up the reason I am sharing my writing. I am actually a very private person and it is scary for me to open my heart and be vulnerable in this way. I know there will be haters and people who will criticize or disagree. I am not a doctor or a guru and I make no claim on having the corner on the market for anything. My life is still a grand experiment every single day. But I have found some things that have worked for me–techniques and people and books that have helped me to heal some broken places, find balance and peace and improved health. They are mostly things I’ve gleaned from actual gurus, my parents and grandparents and sister, my kids (definitely amongst my best teachers), my therapists, and my bestie girlfriends (aka sisters from other mothers) who have seen me through thick and thin (literally and figuratively) and said just what I needed to hear, just when I needed to hear it.
You may or may not like what I have to say. And not everything I say will appeal to every person. But I find hope in my favorite quote, which has been magnetized to my refrigerator for many years now:
“To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is my hope that perhaps one life will breathe easier because of something I have shared. If so, then I have succeeded.
If there is one thing the last several years have taught me, it’s that life is about second chances. Every day, every moment, every interaction, every breath is an opportunity to begin again.
I have repeatedly woven these words throughout this blog. I believe in love and I believe in second chances for love, whether it’s in the relationship you’ve been in for 30 years or the relationship with your children or a new relationship.
Usually new beginnings start with improving ourselves–finding balance, becoming healthier, wiser, and more stable. I suppose if I was going to make a “step-by-step guide to finding your one”, that would be the first step.
Succulent fountain-wedding gift from my sisters from other mothers and a beautiful representation of what can manifest and grow when you open your heart. My friends filled it with cuttings from their own gardens—little pieces of their hearts that bring me joy every time I look at it. Thank you friends!
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