Issue #205: Getting Divorced Made Me Realize I Had Approached Dating All Wrong

Let's talk about love.

🎥 ‘Finally Dawn’ on Apple TV+: This new movie pits 1950s Hollywood and Italian cinema against each other, as a young Italian woman is pulled into a surreal audition process, with a star-studded cast that includes Lily James and Willem Dafoe.

📚 Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart: One of the things I most admired when reading my first Shteyngart novel, Our Country Friends (reviewed here!), was his exploration of characters, both like himself (often making fun of himself) and cultures apart. His latest is told from the perspective of a curious 10-year-old Korean-Jewish girl who wants nothing more than to keep her family together and meet her birth mother.

🎧 “The Retrievals,” Season 2: I was shocked to learn, in the first episode of this New York Times-produced podcast, that as many of 8% of all C-section patients experience significant pain during their procedure. For many, this means feeling every part of the surgery—an excruciating and traumatic experience that host Susan Burton explores in detail in the first episode, followed by an exploration of a culture that ignores pregnant women’s pain and the steps being made to ensure this never happens.

A still from Celine Song’s ‘The Materialists’

On an early date with my now-boyfriend, I told him I wasn’t sure I believed in love anymore. At least not in the way I had before…

I had spent half my life in relationships, hopping from one to the next in search of a husband until I found him, fourteen years ago in western Denmark. The first time I met my ex-husband, as teenagers studying abroad, he made me laugh so hard that I fell in love with him almost instantly and married him a decade later, in a friend’s backyard in the middle of the pandemic.

Trying on wedding dresses, in 2019

My husband had every quality I could want in a life partner—he is kind, curious, smart, adored me, and wanted similar things out of life. For years, I couldn’t imagine ever wanting anyone else. But as our first, then second, wedding anniversary approached, I found it increasingly difficult to shake the feeling that something was missing. Whatever magic had drawn us together in the beginning had all but vanished. I felt like I had blinked, and missed the point where we had gone from lovers to logistical partners. Even as we separated, we tried desperately to hold on. Despite our efforts, neither one of us could find a way back. We had drifted too far, though my heart will always be broken for those two kids who fell in love and thought it would last a lifetime; that our compatibility would do the work for us.

When I began dating my boyfriend, I had spent the year prior obsessively unpacking this chasm. Where had things gone wrong? If my husband and I couldn’t make it, how could I ever maintain love with another? Was it even possible? Was I broken? I was consumed by—and terrified of—the transformation I had missed before, that silent shift from lovers to logistical partners.

My single friends assured me that I could find and maintain love. But many friends who had gone through this shift with their own partners tried to convince me that it was inevitable. I could tell they felt like I had lost my mind in divorcing someone like my ex. But that didn’t feel true to me either—that something as Earth-shattering as love could just… fizzle. It’s ironic that it took a divorce for me to completely unravel my concept of love and build back a stronger conviction in its ability to thrive, but that’s exactly what happened. Read on for:

• The problem with relying on a “checklist”

• Mistaking stability in a relationship for connection

• A tour of my dating history, and where it’s led…