I have been married three times, which is not the kind of thing you put on a cake, but it does make for an interesting résumé.
At this point, I have enough relationship experience to qualify as either deeply wise or medically concerning. The jury is still out.
People love to say, “Love finds you when you least expect it.” That sounds lovely stitched on a pillow, but it is considerably less comforting when you have already expected it, trusted it, married it, unpacked your kitchen gadgets for it, and then watched it all go sideways in a spectacular fireball anyway.
Failed love, for me, did not look dramatic at first. It looked hopeful. It looked like trying. It looked like I had a plan, which was adorable. It looked like believing that if I just loved hard enough, stayed loyal enough, bent enough, forgave enough, endured enough, then eventually something beautiful would grow out of all that effort.
It turns out that is not love.
That is emotional CrossFit.
For a long time, I confused perseverance with wisdom. I thought staying proved character. I thought fixing things proved devotion. I thought if I just refused to become another divorce statistic, especially coming from a family history I was determined not to repeat, then somehow grit alone would redeem bad choices.
It did not.
My pattern was not subtle. I was overexuberant. I jumped headfirst into the next relationship before the emotional wreckage from the last one had even stopped smoking. I was afraid of being alone, which is how you end up auditioning for the role of yourself in somebody else’s life.
If you ever saw the movie, The Running Bride, remember how all her fiancés liked their eggs differently, and she just kept becoming whatever version they preferred? That was me, minus the movie-star glow, ten-million-dollar salary and plus several regrettable legal commitments. I did not just change my eggs. I changed myself to match the room. I bent, adjusted, accommodated, and called it love. Then I sashayed myself straight down those aisles like a woman ignoring every warning light on the dashboard.
Somewhere along the line, I got so good at becoming what other people needed that I lost sight of what I needed myself.
My first husband was my first real relationship and, in truth, a better friend than partner. Such a good friend that after our divorce, he married one of my bridesmaids. Husband number two, who I simply refer to as Satan because efficiency matters, was physically and emotionally abusive. Enough said about him. Husband number three was my internet mistake, an AOL thirty-something chat room decision that somehow lasted eighteen years and still managed to end like a fireworks factory in a lightning storm.
What did all that cost me?
Oh, nothing major. Just my self-esteem, my self-reliance, my self-worth, years of happiness, and pieces of my connection to family and friends. You know. Tiny things.
By the time divorce number three rolled around, I was done in a way that had nothing to do with paperwork. I broke. Not gracefully, not poetically, not in some cinematic montage where a strong woman stares out a rain-covered window and immediately becomes enlightened. I broke the real way. The ugly way. The exhausted, disillusioned, soul-level way.
And, as it turns out, I needed to.
Because sometimes the only thing left to do with the version of yourself that kept surviving the wrong things is to let her fall apart and build someone wiser from the rubble.
So I fled Washington State and came back to Florida. I reinvented myself. Again. Only this time, I did something radical.
I stopped chasing.
I did not leap into another relationship. I did not go looking for a replacement plan in camo. I did not convince myself that the cure for heartbreak was a man with potential and a pickup truck.
I stayed single.
Not because I had become some fierce, untouchable feminist icon who needed no one. I stayed single because I no longer trusted myself to choose well, and I trusted men even less. Also, after my last divorce, I watched enough Forensic Files to conclude that looking for new love was not a romantic endeavor. It was a questionable survival strategy. There are a startling number of whackos out there, and many of them seem perfectly pleasant right up until the detectives start spraying luminol. That is not cynicism. That is risk assessment. I had to learn how to live without attaching my worth to whether somebody wanted me. I had to learn survival, plain and simple, through grit, determination, and a stubborn refusal to let my life become one long apology for what other people had done to it.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, there was Jim.
Jim had been part of my story long before he ever became part of my future. We had been close since grade school. We hunted tadpoles, frogs, and snakes together as kids, which I realize may not scream romantic destiny unless you were raised in Florida, in which case it is practically foreplay.
Then he moved away to New Jersey to live with his dad during middle school and part of high school. When he came back, I was hoping he might ask me out. He did not. Instead, he started dating my best friend, whom he later married, which was not exactly the outcome I had sketched in my adolescent dream journal.
Apparently, the two of them felt sorry for me, because they introduced me to a good friend of his.
That was husband Number One.
So if you really want to map my love life, it turns out Jim and his first wife were both in my first wedding, which feels less like romance and more like a very complicated family tree with cocktails.
Over the years, life happened to both of us. Marriages. Divorces. Hard lessons. Kids for him. No kids for me, though I have loved his like my own for years. I was at the hospital the day his oldest daughter was born. She was the product of two people I loved very much and damn near perfect. That is how far back this all goes. That is how deeply our lives have been woven together, even when we were off living entirely separate chapters.
He went into the Navy around the same time I divorced husband number one. Then we did not see each other again for more than twenty five years, until I moved back to Florida after my last debacle.
But even during all those years apart, Jim somehow remained the standard.
After Failure #3, I told multiple people (including professionals) that if I ever dated again, which I absolutely did not plan to do, the man would have to be exactly like Jim. Funny, smart, grounded, brilliant, successful, and kind. The sort of man who makes other men look like poorly assembled lawn furniture. He would have to be an amazing father and grandfather. And because truth matters, he would have to be hot. Super-hot. Bald, tattooed, just the right amount of facial hair, and confident in a way that does not need to announce itself. He would know how to cook the perfect Ribeye steak. Oh, and he would be a successful nurse practitioner in a busy ER department, so he literally saves lives on a daily basis. You know. Superman in scrubs. There was only one man in this world like that and that was Jim.
The beauty of using Jim as the standard was that it was very safe. He was unavailable at the time. Married. Off the market. Which meant I could hold him up as the ideal without ever having to risk anything real. I was perfectly content being single if the alternative was settling for less than a man exactly like him.
Then God, apparently, said, “Hold my beer.”
One of my favorite memories, and probably proof that the Lord has an exceptional sense of humor, happened in 2017.
I was living in Florida and started having chest pain and palpitations. I could tell my blood pressure was sky high. I drove myself to a standalone ER in Plant City, FL. It was not even the closest hospital, but something in my misfiring brain told me to go there instead.
They whisked me into a room, started triage, and slapped on EKG leads while hiking my shirt clear up to my neck. My girls were making a full, unplanned public appearance in a tattered granny bra.
And then, in the middle of all that chaos, I looked up and saw Jim’s face appear in the little window on the door.
He was the nurse practitioner on duty that night.
I had no idea he even worked there.
The nurses were bustling around, serious and confused, trying to make sure I wasn’t dying on that gurney, and I started laughing. They probably thought I had gone completely off the rails. I pointed to the door and said, “That’s my best friend. I’ve known him since we were five. After all these years, he finally got to see my boobs.”
They all laughed. Including Jim.
Then he sent me by ambulance to Brandon to be admitted, which honestly is what I call mixed messaging.
That was us. History, affection, trust, timing, and terrible comedic instincts all wrapped into one fluorescent-lit moment.
By the time love finally found us, it did not look anything like it had in my younger years. It was not frantic. It was not performative. It did not require me to become smaller, softer, quieter, prettier, easier, or more useful. It did not ask me to audition.
It just saw me.
And not the polished version either. Not the younger version. Not the one with all her hair, or all her confidence, or a flatter stomach, or an easier life.
Jim has seen me at my best and my absolute worst. He has seen me overweight, bald and gray from chemo, and saddled with a hernia that looked like I was nine months pregnant on just the right side of my body. He has seen the damage. The vulnerability. He has seen the rebuilding.
None of it scared him off.
That kind of love will humble you.
After everything I had been through, I thought if love ever came back around, it would need to arrive like fireworks to prove itself. Grand gesture. Big speech. Choir of angels. Instead, it arrived like truth. Steady. Familiar. Safe. Solid. The kind of love that does not make your stomach drop. The kind that lets your shoulders unclench.
At one point, after his divorce, we made a pact that if we were both still single at seventy, we would marry each other.
Turns out, we could not wait that long.
There is something almost holy about being loved well after being loved poorly. Not because it erases what came before. It does not. Failed love still failed. It still wounded. It still cost me years I can never get back.
But it taught me what not to confuse with love ever again.
Love is not endurance for endurance’s sake. It is not self-erasure. It is not managing somebody else’s chaos while calling it commitment. It is not loneliness in a shared bed. It is not constantly shape-shifting to earn what should be given freely.
Love, real love, feels like peace with a pulse.
So yes, love failed me. Spectacularly, repeatedly, with enough gusto to qualify as a cautionary tale.
And still, somehow, it didn’t.
Not because I finally became perfect.
Not because my story turned pretty.
Not because I earned some romantic reward for suffering.
It didn’t fail me in the end because sometimes life, in all its strange mercy, circles back and places something beautiful in the hands of the person who had almost stopped reaching.
And when it does, you understand something at last.
The right love does not ask you to become someone else.
It lets you come home as yourself.
70 Staples - Not broken. Rebuilt. 
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