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It happened again. As usual, when I posted a meditative, thoughtful post about being single on Facebook, some people reacted saying they resonated with it, whereas others gave the typical unsolicited advice.

It never fails to amaze me how people are so apt to do this on women’s social media pages. It’s almost as if the vulnerability we have begets a sort of judgement, and that judgement varies depending upon the reader. In this case, there were a few people who said that “when you least expect it, he’ll come to you.”

This might have made sense to me a few years ago, when I first separated from my ex. But now, as I write about being out of my marriage almost four years and feeling content, it feels odd to receive such advice. I want to shout back, “I just said I was content damn it! Why are you still talking about the same old thing?”

Of course, I suppose in a way, I’m still talking about the same old thing. I’m still reflecting on who I am and how I got here, and necessarily that journey involves my past with my ex. I suppose until I do meet someone, if I do, my solo journey will raise some eyebrows. But what amazes me is that when I talk about how there are riches in being single, how there are paths to contentment in both singlehood and marriage and all the myriad states of relationship in between, that I still get the same main pieces of unsolicited advice.

1) Find yourself.  You won’t be a good partner until you know who you are.

2) When you’re happy and whole in yourself, he’ll appear.

3) When you think you don’t even need a man, that’s when he’ll show up.

And, paradoxically . . .

4) Continue to be you and be whole and let God prepare you for marriage. When you find the right person, and you will, you’ll know and you’ll be ready.

5) Don’t underestimate the power of a loving partnership. You just haven’t met him yet.

Here’s my problem with all of this advice. First of all, it assumes that I am actively looking for a relationship, when currently, I am not. The point of my Facebook post was to say that I am relatively content single and that I know that right now is not the right season for me to couple anyway. So it’s sort of funny that people keep giving me advice geared towards escaping singleness. It’s almost like they’re saying “be really happy single and then poof! you’ll escape it!”  If singleness were a more viable option in people’s eyes, would people still say things like this? Or is it that somehow they think I doth protest too much? That they see that in some ways I still do want a relationship?

Well, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. I suppose I do want a relationship. But not necessarily right now. It’s like when I was a kid and I used to write my high school graduation date on a chalkboard. Yes, I wanted to graduate and go to college, but I knew I was still a child and not there yet.

In this case, I feel emotionally ready for a new relationship, but I know that right now my circumstances are not really geared towards having one. For one thing, I have two roommates — my best friend and her husband, and if I were to get serious with someone that would be downright (thanks Ken!) awkward. I also have three cats. So currently, I live in a two bedroom, one bathroom condo with two other people and three cats. As my former playwriting mentor would say, “Girrrrrrl, it’s pretty crowded up on that stage.” There really is not any physical space for another person in my life.

I also have no mental space for someone. While I might be emotionally ready, I don’t really have the time or energy for a relationship right now. I’m working four part-time jobs and freelancing to make ends meet. I’m doing okay, but my days are long and oddly scheduled, and I stopped dating partly because it was just too hard even to make the time for first dates with people. So I thought “well, if I can’t even easily meet them, how can I even begin to think about dating them?”

And then there’s my book. My book that has been languishing all this time while I figure out what to do with my life and how to put my financial world back together. I have to get the book out this summer. Like it’s GOTTA happen. I can’t really date anyone until it’s ready to query.

So I have my situation, and I have my goals, and right now all of that is pretty overwhelming in itself. I suppose some people need to have a fuller life in order to be a better partner. For me, the answer is probably that I need a life that is less full — or at least less busy, and I don’t see that happening any time soon. If anything, I imagine that if I get an agent, my life will suddenly be even busier, especially if I go on submission. And then there will be the other books or creative works that I will need to write, so as long as I’m working four part-time jobs, freelancing, and trying to write, I just can’t wrap my head around being anywhere near who I’d want to be as someone’s life partner.

But what is more frustrating about the advice is that when I think about my female friends who are all empowered and independent and amazing, I realize that most of them are single. Most of the women I know who are my heroines are strong, single women. And it’s not that we don’t want a partner. It’s that, for whatever reason, we’ve all ended up at midlife single.

Does this mean that there are a lot of midlife women out there wandering around trying to find themselves? Actually I think it’s quite the opposite. While sure, there may be many of us caught up in the throes of self discovery, there is also a large percentage of us who are incredibly self aware. It’s not that we don’t know who we are; it’s that we do. And I think that scares the shit out of most men. One of my friends agreed that men coming out of a marriage tend to want three things: sex, food, and comfort, and that they are not nearly as discriminating or as strong as their female midlife counterparts.

So then why on earth are we continuing to give our fellow women this advice? Aren’t we giving it to the wrong gender? Tell a man who is recently divorced to find himself or to “be content whole” or to “prepare yourself for marriage and then God will reveal her to you” and see how far you get with that. No, it’s really not going to happen. Yes, I’ve seen the occasional man be told this, but by and large, the only advice men get is to “get back out there.”

This is emblematic of a larger problem. Men on the whole do not self examine. On the one hand, it’s not your fault, men, particularly if you’re over 45. You weren’t socialized to think things through the way we were. You weren’t encouraged to bond with each other over sleepovers and to talk about relationships in the same way we were. You weren’t encouraged to discuss your feelings.

Okay, so maybe it’s not your fault. But self examination is still your responsibility. Anyone who gets into or out of a relationship can benefit from the riches of solitude, from being alone for awhile and figuring out what went wrong and how better to be in the next relationship. Especially if you’re thinking of remarriage.

“I want a man who is self aware,” I told a group of women recently, and they all laughed at me. “Men aren’t self aware,” one of them said, and I half-agreed. “Some men are,” I said, but they tend to be younger men. Parenting changes in the eighties have seemed to result in at least a certain group of young men who actually are more self aware, and that’s a great thing.

But so many still aren’t, and it’s a problem. If you go from one relationship to the next always avoiding yourself, you’re never going to heal. You’re never going to face your inner demons. Yes, maybe you will be able to get into a relationship; after all, there are many amazing women out there for you. But I wonder how good that relationship is going to be, and whether or not you’ll be repeating the same patterns.

We all have different paths and different ways of healing. For some of us, maybe that healing happens within a relationship. For others, maybe it happens between them. And still for others, like me, maybe it’s meant to span a number of years and just take a long time, possibly even a lifetime.

And that’s okay. But the next time you feel the need to tell a woman to find herself, ask yourself “is it her I’m talking to, or is it me who really needs to be found?”

I can just see it now. My grandparents are all collectively rolling in their graves. I just swore in the title of this inaugural post.

But I am back, and it calls for celebration. Where am I returning from? Well, that’s an interesting question.  I can answer it metaphorically, and I can answer it literally. I’ll start with the literal.

For almost two years, I wrote a weekly column for the Houston Chronicle’s Gray Matters blog. The column was called Split Happens. You can find the posts archived here. It chronicled my journey through my separation from my ex-husband and ended when the divorce was final and I’d been out of the marriage for two years. Some people were upset that I ended the column. At the time, I had mixed feelings.  But it had gone as far as it could go in that incarnation and I couldn’t really figure out a way to keep it going. Even though the headline of the final post read “After the divorce, finally healed, finally whole,” well, I wasn’t.  In some ways, that was just the beginning of my journey.

The journey I needed to take was not one anyone could really accompany me on. It was dark, and, while the tone of many of my Split Happens posts ranges from whimsical to longing to wistful to down right funny, I needed to go deeper.

Basically, I needed to work through some shit, and it was only shit I wanted my therapist to hear. I also was upset by the fact that so many of my male readers thought that after two years, I should be “moving on.” (This will be the subject of a later post, definitely) They defined moving on as being with someone new, when at the two year post-separation mark, I was nowhere near being ready for someone new. I’d already been there. Tried that. To varying degrees of disaster. No, at that point, I needed to get right with myself and figure out what made me who I am. I needed to figure out why I was always drawn to narcissistic partners, why when I thought I had good self esteem that I was behaving as if I had none, why I kept doing things that demonstrated not only a lack of respect for myself but a lack of self-caring.

So I went deep, and I went to that dark place alone. At a certain point, I even had to go there without a therapist. There were days I never thought I’d survive it. I had to confront my codependency and figure out a way not to repeat those patterns. I can’t say that at this point I am necessarily completely healed, either, but I am at a much stronger place. At least emotionally.

Physically, financially and professionally, though, it’s a different story. I always felt like when my ex and I split that the dominoes fell, and that the first thing that fell was my emotional and spiritual health and then my physical health and then my financial health. Artistically, I was on fire then, and that was the only thing that kept me sane. In fact, I think if I hadn’t had the column, I might have even been worse. But eventually, the emotional toil made its impact in other ways.

For one, the business that I’d been nurturing since 2011 pretty much tanked. Since I was not functional for about two months after the split, I lost many of my clients and lost credibility. It is one of the deepest regrets that I have that I didn’t just put everything on hold and take a month or two completely off rather than try to work through that time. And yet, financially I had to work. There really wasn’t any way around it.

I lost 45 pounds in two months immediately post-separation because I did not eat for most of that time. People were telling me how great I looked, and I suppose in many ways I did look good, because I had the weight to lose, but my body was basically shutting down. I was not eating; I was not sleeping. At one point, I had to be prescribed medication to force me to sleep, or be hospitalized.

Eventually, of course, I made my way back. I gained back weight — and now need to work on getting it off again — and began eating more normally. I started working out with a trainer and then when I couldn’t afford to continue tried to keep going on my own, with some success. I started sleeping through the night again.

But my business never really recovered. It’s one of the most devastating parts of the divorce, and the part that stings the most is that it was my response to the event. I can’t blame my ex. But it stings, and it also stings that I’m struggling so much financially because I have just never been able to recover.

Some women write about how transformative divorce is and how empowering. It is. Particularly if you’ve been with an abusive partner. But the part most people don’t tell you about is that the climb back is long and slow, and filled with setbacks. There is no triumphant stand-on-the-mountaintop moment for most of us. For most of us, it’s just “good, this month I was able to make my mortgage payment” or “this month I was able to pay the rent.”

So since I stopped writing my column, life’s been hard and not a lot of fun, but it’s also been mine. Even though there are still days I’m terrified I’m going to end up under a bridge, there are other days when I feel unbelievably light and even giddy. Those days are more and more often, and the anxious days, the sad days are much fewer.  What I notice about the sad days now is that they’re not really about the divorce or the fact that I am divorced, they’re more about something I witnessed or something I read about in the news, or my aging cat, Cougar. I’m not sad about my ex anymore. In fact, I wish him well. It would make me happy to see him in a healthy, normal romantic relationship. So I guess you could say that I’m over him.

I may not be over the damage he’s caused, and I may never be able to trust anyone again, but I’m over him.

And that, indeed, is progress.