Blind Date #474: How I Met My Husband After Only 22 Years of Looking
We’re talking three years ago this September. I’d been divorced for 22 years, my children grown and gone from home by this point. I had more first-dates behind me than oil changes, visits to my hairdresser, and even the ATM—combined. That’s how it felt, anyway.
I’d had a few medium-term relationships over those years, and a couple that lasted longer. I’d known the love of a few good men—just not the right ones for me. So at the age of 57, I was alone, and though my life was full and good in many ways I had never stopped looking for my true partner. It had come to seem as if I might have an easier time locating the back of an earring I lost in 1987 than the good man with whom I could spend the rest of my life.
My most recent and disheartening romantic experience at that point—a non-romantic experience, more accurately—had just ended badly when I invited a man I’d met online to join me on a ten-day trip to Italy. I’d been hired to teach writing, with an all expense-paid trip and a hotel room on the Amalfi coast. Having travelled to beautiful places where I’d sit at my table-for-one thinking how nice it would be to have a partner across from me to share a bottle of wine, inviting Mr. X to join me on this trip had seemed, very briefly, like a good idea.
Two hours into day one it was clear that it doesn’t matter how great the view may be, if the person you’re sharing it with isn’t the right one, then you’d do better solo.
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I was honest, I told Mr. X how I felt on day three, suggesting as gently as I could that though I was sure he was a great guy, he might do the rest of his exploring from some other bed in some other hotel room. He responded by sticking me with the bill for his bar tab and firing off an email suggesting that my Match.com profile come with a warning attached.
The fact that I’d ever thought, for even five minutes, that I could have a relationship with Mr. X might have caused me to lose all faith in my judgment. That trip to Italy might have inspired me to take my profile down and sign up for accordion lessons or a two-year stint in the Congo, volunteering to save the Bonobo, but I took the get-back-on-the-horse approach. At least I’d learned something from this most recent dating experience: Don’t invite anyone to Italy without first asking whether their idea of a romantic night involves having sex with the volume turned down on the Giants game. Don’t ever spend your time with a person simply because you’re tired of being alone. Even if you are.
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After Mr. X, I was more cautious. Mr. Y was a terrific guy who cooked for me and took me out in the San Francisco Bay on his sailboat. Not only did he still have all his hair, he was thoughtful and affectionate, too. He knew my children’s names and seemed genuinely interested in hearing my stories, as well as telling me his. I really liked this man.
But I had learned a valuable lesson from the Mr. X experience: However badly you might want a partner, and however long you’ve been without one, it’s never going to work with a person if your heart doesn’t lift when he walks in the door. The man I’d been looking for was not just the person I’d go out dancing with, he was the one I could stay home with, and the one whose face I’d still want to see, when he was old and I was too. The person I could share my happiest times with, but also the hardest ones.
In my case, I also knew the partner I was looking for had to know how to make me laugh. Not by telling me jokes, just because he could see humor in ordinary life.
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Most online dating sites allow you to see if someone’s studied your profile, and vice versa. In the case of Jim and me, we’d clicked to each other’s pictures and stories a couple of times without doing anything more about it. I knew he was a good looking man, about my age, divorced almost as long as I was, with grown children—a man who did work he cared about, and possessed interests that, though different from mine, suggested he’d be a person I’d like.
He cared about the world. Also about music. He loved science, and being outdoors. He liked motorcycles. This was my clue that behind his good-guy exterior, there lurked enough of a bad boy for me.
Then he sent me a message. “Maybe we should talk?”
That first telephone conversation lasted almost two hours. A few days later we met for a drink, and stayed at the restaurant until closing time. I had not yet kissed this man, but I knew I could talk to him, and listen.
In the past, on all those hundreds of blind dates I’d been on, it had seemed wise to present one’s best and most desirable self to the prospective partner, who was no doubt doing precisely the same thing. To know a person by his or her Match.com profile, you’d think all anyone ever did was read great books, run on the beach, play guitar, cook gourmet meals, and volunteer with underprivileged kids.
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On our first date Jim told me he was shy, and sometimes melancholy. I told him I’d recently been arrested for drunk driving. (Only weeks before, I’d been pulled over, driving home alone after a couple of glasses of wine at a party. In the end, I was found to have been under the legal limit and released, but not before a pretty humiliating and scary two hours at the police station. This is not the kind of story a person generally wants to haul out and tell a person on a first date, by the way. Not if she would like to have a second date.)
Jim took all of this in thoughtfully. Then he was quiet for a moment, “I’m a good driver,” he told me. “So how about we agree that when you and I go someplace, I’ll drive?”
I invited him to my house and cooked us dinner. Seated on opposite sides from each other at the table, he reached across and took my arm. Raised it to his lips. For a moment I thought he was going to say something, and then I saw that some of my homemade pesto sauce had found its way onto my elbow. Jim leaned closer and licked it off. Then, with no particular fanfare, resumed the conversation.
He did not fit my idea of who I was looking for. I had this picture in my head, of a tall man—six feet anyway, and solidly built. Jim had a couple of inches over me, but not if I wore my highest heels. And we could have shared our blue jeans.
Then there was this: When I imagined a partner for myself, he was always a person with a big, outgoing personality—a life-of-the-party type. Jim was a soft-spoken, quiet person. I walk into a party and find someone I’d like to know and introduce myself. Jim looks for a familiar face, and if he can’t find one, may study the host’s collection of art work, or his books.
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On our fourth date—sitting outside on a beautiful day, watching the Blue Angels execute their amazing flying routines over the skies of San Francisco-–I made an observation about how sexy it was, seeing those planes circle and dive overhead. My heart sped up, watching them, and I think this was so because for me—a woman who’d been on her own for more years of her adult life than she’d been married—there was not much that stirred me more than the idea of some strong, commanding male force in my life, someone who could give me a break from my twenty years of being in charge of every single thing all the time, without being overbearing about it.
At the time I made my Blue Angels remark to Jim, I was still confused about why I felt happy spending time with a person who matched so few of my pre-set qualifications. Because I felt so comfortable with Jim, and because, from the very first time we spoke, it had seemed necessary to be scrupulously honest with him, I explained to him the part about having pictured myself with a tall man. “You know what you need, Joyce?” a friend had told me once. “A burly man.”
Some things a person can change about himself. Others he can’t.
“I will never be tall,” Jim said. “And I doubt I’ll ever be burly.”
We were quiet for a moment. This was something I’d come to appreciate about being with Jim, the way we didn’t have to talk all the time. How easy and good it felt to simply be with him, saying nothing at all. But then he spoke.
“I’ve heard that one pre-requisite for becoming one of the Blue Angels is their height requirement,” he told me. “To fly with the Blue Angels, a person can’t be taller than five foot nine.” His height, exactly.
Something happened for me at that moment. The man at my side might not have been as tall as I’d imagined he’d be. But he was smart. Also funny, in just the way I liked. And it came to me that this was more important. This was a person to whom I would always want to tell the truth, and I would know he’d tell me the truth back. (The truth about almost everything, anyway. The part about the Blue Angel qualification was made up.)
We moved in together four weeks after we met. Last summer, just before the second anniversary of our meeting, we got married. Three months later, I turned 60. Jim had just turned 61.
I waited a long time to find my partner. And it has come to me, over these three years since I found him, that all those years I spent on my own were part of what has made it possible to be the partner I am for him, to know what matters and what doesn’t. And to recognize a treasure when I have one.
