I thought I had moved on.
In 2019, I was living alone in a small mid-Missouri tourist town. My husband and I had moved there together a few years earlier.
He came home from a business trip in the fall of 2015 and told me he wanted a divorce. It was finalized in January of 2016.
This left me floating, rootless, and doubtful I wanted to stick around.
Working with my marriage counselor had transformed my state of mind but moving anywhere seemed cold and miserable.
Everything changed that spring when I fell in love with a man who lived 160 miles away in the suburbs of St. Louis.
For seven months we had the time of our lives. Then he left too.
He broke up with me the first time because he became ill with his first round of major depression. He decided the best way to avoid losing my respect was to bow out of my life while he fixed the problem.
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Nine months later he reappeared to apologize and show off his hard work. He had treated the depression, adopted a dog, lost 80 pounds and become a social butterfly.
The second time we broke up after he lost his job during a large-scale round of government layoffs. After an exhausting five month job search, he took a position across the country.
There was already so much uncertainty that I didn’t ask about our future and he didn’t mention it either.
So far, our whole relationship had taken place over a 150 miles of distance. Neither of us wanted to talk about what thousands of miles would do.
Occasionally he would reach out and fall silent again.
Over this messy 3 year period of back and forth, I busied myself with work and went to every vaguely interesting concert I could find.
My feelings about this oddball relationship were so intense they took me by surprise.
Even though I didn’t want a divorce, it didn’t come as much of a shock. My husband and I had been fighting like two cornered, confused animals.
While I would have fought much harder to save our marriage, I was relieved when it was over.
Finding and losing new love was devastating, but served to further hone my skills at work. I became even more understanding about what my coaching clients were going through.
By then I had learned from a man who had devoted his 60-year career to saving marriages that seemed hopeless.
I’d spent over a decade studying and fixing breakups with a neurosurgeon’s level of precision. I had lived through divorce and salvaged a friendship with my ex husband afterwards.
I was arrogant enough to believe all this experience should have prevented me from heartbreak. I thought I already knew what rock bottom felt like.
I was humbled by how wrong I was.
My only real consolation was our breakup was dependent on circumstances beyond either of our control. Unlike my divorce, this situation wasn’t a result of a crushing decline in love and respect.
We had never said so much as an angry word to each other.
Because things were still so good between us, every time I saw or heard from him, I had the best time I could possibly imagine. I became hopeful and then crushed when our connection was ripped away over and over.
The situation felt cruel, but he never seemed that way.
The lack of blame made it easier to keep trying. Even when things got so hard I wanted to lash out, I grit my teeth and did exactly what I would suggest for a client.
Battle-testing my work this way yielded massively positive side effects. Even if I wouldn’t wish the whole messy process on my worst enemy.
My confidence grew because I would never suggest a client try something I was too scared to do myself. I walked my talk and faced the consequences.
As a result, I was free of all possible guilt about the way I treated him. To this day, there is still nothing I would have done differently.
Yet after his move and nine months of radio silence between us, I lost hope I would ever hear from him again.
Once again, I did what I would advise a client and tried to move on.
But I had other immediate problems. Missouri was wearing on me. I was sick of social isolation, winter, humidity, and bugs. Small town dating was hard work.
Besides cultivating a few treasured local friendships, I had failed to put down roots.
The idea of moving felt overwhelming and contaminated with shame.
Everywhere I had ever lived was a twist of fate or man-related fuckery. And I was pissed at myself for getting to this point and deeply fed up with compromising.
I promised myself that my next home would be created cleanly from my own desire. From there, I began brainstorming places to live.
Even though I could move anywhere, I wanted somewhere closer to family, with a large population, better weather, and good scenery. This narrowed things down.
Growing up in southern California had spawned unrealistic expectations about weather and convenience. I could have returned, but I didn’t want to deal with the prices or traffic. It looked like a rat race I wasn’t eager to rejoin.
My parents love living in Las Vegas, but off the strip, the glitz fades in an unsavory way I never liked.
I began to zero in on Phoenix.
When I was a kid, I loved our family trips to Arizona to visit my grandmother. After a visit to Mill Road in Tempe as a grumpy teenager I told myself I would move there some day.
And… an abundance of attractive local men certainly couldn’t hurt.
One afternoon I fired up Meetup, changed my location to Phoenix and searched for interesting local groups.
I scrolled through and joined a few without looking very hard.
“Introverts Who Like Social Events” check.
“Single Nerds Who Want to Meet For Dinner” check.
“Phoenix Transplants Looking For New Friends” check.
I’m not sure what caused me to click on a random list of group participants for the first time.
Clearly I wouldn’t know anyone. Maybe I was scanning for evidence of sentient life? I’m still not sure.
Suddenly HIS picture was right there, staring back at me. My ex had already beat me to the Meetup idea.
I still have no idea why he was at the top of that list. It wasn’t alphabetical. I had used a new email to create my account. This was some strong algorithmic black magic.
Shit shit shit.
The irony of mini-manifesting my SP (specific person) like this was not lost on me. Situations like this had happened before and it was always a miraculous shock.
I knew he lived there. Our second breakup was a direct result of his choice to move there and ghost me in the process.
Of COURSE he was there.
I hadn’t expected to confront this reality in my first five minutes inside Meetup. The hot burn of freak-out energy spread across my chest.
A long glance at his profile showed he had already claimed most of the social groups I would be interested in.
If I moved without telling him and then ran into him I would look like I wandered straight out of My Crazy Ex Girlfriend.
Dear reader, I swear my motivations for Phoenix had been clean up to that point. I thought the other 5 million Phoenix residents would give me enough cloud cover for anonymity.
Now I was creating a pickle. It was time for soul-searching about whether my motives were truly clean.
And yes, I absolutely still cared what he thought. And I was faced with the inconvenient truth that I still loved him. Even if he didn’t seem to feel the same way.
Several conflicting truths swirled through my mind.
First, the more I tried to talk myself out of it, the more I wanted to move to Phoenix. Even though I felt crazy, something about the place felt right.
Second, he hadn’t spoken to me in nine months. I had no good reason to think he would start any time soon. It wasn’t even his business if I moved to Phoenix.
At that point, he hadn’t even given me a clear idea of why he wasn’t talking to me. The most logical thing to do was keep moving on.
However, the coach version of myself who knows how this works stubbornly refused to quit strategizing.
If I was going to do anything about this, I had better figure out how to get clear about both the place and the man.
I shut the app, threw my phone across my bed in disgust and tried to become more interested in moving to Portland.
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