Here’s Why I Might End Up Alone For Like, Forever
Why the 35 year old single mom hasn’t found lasting love.
My whole life, I thought I would marry young. And well, I did--I got married before my twenty-first birthday. But I was also divorced by twenty-three.
Looking over the trajectory of my love life, I've found a lot of patterns. Like it's rare for me to even fall in love, yet when it does it happens quickly. And it's rare for me be genuinely attracted to someone, anyone.
I loved one person when I was eighteen and nineteen, but he broke my heart. He was my first Willoughby. You know what I mean. That guy who seems to be one thing but turns out to be another. Who marries eventually out of convenience. Once you discover he’s no good for you, he’s already gone and you’re mourning nothing but a phantom.
I met Willoughby #1 in a ministry internship which ended up being a cult. (A cult I keep meaning to write about, but hello, that’s such a big story to put out there.) We weren’t allowed to have romantic relationships in the program, so our relationship was a secret.
All of the secrecy fed into my many misconceptions about love. As if I needed big sweeping gestures for love to be real. And maybe that’s why I loved him as much as I did. Because I thought what was happening…
