Improved Divorced Man

During a typically winding conversation between me and K yesterday, somehow I found myself telling her about the very first post I ever made on this blog. It was the day after SnarkEx had just told me she was leaving me, and I wrote about how I hadn't got much sleep the night before.

Between trying to sleep and spinning the wheels in my head over and over and over again, I fantasized about all the great sex I'm going to have as a divorced man. I know this is just a fantasy. There's no reason to believe I would have any more sex as a divorced man as I did before I was married, which was seldom. But fantasizing about sex usually relaxes me and puts me to sleep. It didn't quite work, but at least it was a diversion.

But when I relayed that story to K, I realized, wow, I really am, uh, living the dream, so to speak. (Trying to stay gentlemanly here, but let's just say I'm much more satisfied now than I was when I was married.)

This morning in church I realized that, as a divorced man, I'm doing a lot of things that I didn't do when I was married. Like the fact that I was in church. (Okay, it's Unitarians, so it's not really church. More like a secular humanist community with some singing and sermonizing thrown in. But still. They call it church, and I go there on my own.) One of the sticking points in our marriage was that SnarkEx wanted to get more active in our church and I didn't.

SnarkEx and I also fought about cooking. So it's pretty amazing that I've taken an interest in cooking lately. K and I like to cook together, and on our phone dates we often talk about what recipes we're making. Friday night she texted me to say that she was looking at recipes, and although I was watching tennis on TV, there was a cookbook in front of me, and I planned to pick out what to make this week. (Verdict: stuffed peppers. They were very good.) So we were doing the same nerdy thing on a Friday night.

And then there's the whole issue of making babies. Right before she left me, SnarkEx was getting the itch to procreate. I didn't have it. She made a point of telling me that was not why she would leave me, but I know it bothered her. Now, I'm starting to feel like maybe I am ready to have kids, or rather, I could actually see a time when I might be ready, and I know the person I could be ready with.

SnarkEx would probably be upset if she knew the things I'm doing now: church, cooking, thinking of babies, and um, ungentlemanly things. I don't know if I needed to go through a divorce in order to be ready for them, or if just was with the wrong person. But whatever the reason, I can see the difference between me then and me now.