The Problem With Having Your Life All Mapped Out

I never imagined that I would be 43 and single.

After all, I had my life all mapped out. I was voted Most Likely to Succeed and Best Hair in my small Minnesota High School; I was going places. I was going to graduate from college with honors, naturally, and get a high-powered, high-paying job, buy a house, meet an exceptional guy by the time I was 25 and get married soon after and have a couple of kids before I turned 30 and started to get old.

Things started out according to plan. I did have good hair. I did graduate from college with honors. did have a decent career run going. I bought my first house at age 24. I did meet an exceptional guy and married him at age 26. I had my son when I was 28, twin girls at 30. But just as I was pulling out of newborn twin haze and getting ready to ease into the-rest-of-my-fabulous-life, the wheels came off (my husband was a cyclist). My marriage imploded, my life fell apart and I was suddenly a single mom at age 32 who hadn't worked since I got married. I had turned into the woman I made fun of when I was young, single, unencumbered and knew everything.

And while that was not very funny to me at the time, I can see a lot of humor in it now. I have grown up in a million ways and can't imagine my evolution happening on any other path. It's amazing what some time (OK, fine, a decade) and a little perspective (and therapy) can do.

I joke with my friends that it's not freaking funny to be dating, perhaps seen naked for the first time, precisely when the body is starting to shift and melt. When you shift and melt with your longtime love, they knew you back in the day, so they see you through a filter of loving timelessness. Or maybe their eyesight is fading too? They know that your soft tummy and breasts were caused by the stretch of growing their beautiful babies, or the lines by your eyes are the product of shared laughs, vacation sun or squinting together into the future. To be middle-aged and single can be rather awkward, especially if you can't laugh about it. We want to date men our own age, but they often go for a second round start up, only to wind up in the exact same place a few years later. If we go younger we're cougars, and if we go older we're trophies. Everyone judges everyone as hastily as the swipe of a Tinder finger. Book, Cover. I think I already read you. Sometimes married women don't think about this when they feel restless and unappreciated, curious about the other side.

I call this the Greener Grass phenomenon.

It's basically the same thing women have done throughout history. Curly-haired girls want straight hair, while straight-locked girls use curlers. Tall girls slouch and short girls wear heels; brunettes bleach their hair and blondes go Goth; flat girls get implants and big ta-tas get reductions; young girls dress too old and middle-aged mamas dress too young; fair-skinned maidens bake in the sun and leather ladies get dermabrasion; smart girls play dumb and dumb girls act smart. We wait and wonder about puberty and later wax everything off and get our tubes tied.

We are in a constant, futile cycle of thinking the grass is always greener.

Some married women complain that their husbands are controlling; they want sex all the time or else they are boring in bed; they don't help around the house or with the kids; they are married to their jobs or to their cell phones. Married gals get sick of cooking dinner, attending or hosting functions, taking the kids to church alone, being weekend widows to golfers, hunters or workout fanatics or asking a hundred times for something to be done or fixed and finally paying somebody else to do it. They are tired of having to run everything past someone else, as if they were an employee and unable to make plans or find solutions without an approval process.

They wonder what it would be like to feel like "that" again. The rush of emotion, nervousness and excitement that comes with the first blush of love (or lust, really, I mean, c'mon). They miss the way their heart skips a beat when he calls and the miraculous five-pound weight loss from lack of appetite (best diet ever). I contend that it isn't so much the way a woman feels about a man that creates this much flurry, but more the way a man can make a woman feel about herself. Married women miss this. They often feel unseen.

I think marriage has taken a major hit from technology. Think about it. Years ago, if a man wanted to perv out with porn, he had to drive at night to some godforsaken place near the airport with a neon sign and boarded up windows and creep in there like a cretin. Today, he can just peek over his shoulder to make sure she's got the kids in the tub and surf the web for any kind of sleaze. It's totally accessible and seemingly without consequence. The same goes for bored or lonely wives with the advent of Facebook. The last thing a neglected wife needs is to reconnect with her high school flame. Are you kidding me? That is the relational equivalent of throwing a grenade at a gas station. We can send emails, Facebook messages, tweets and texts from the perceived safety of our screen, peeking coyly behind it like a Googling geisha. It seems innocent enough at the time, but whether it's instant porn or instant messaging, it's all immediate gratification and it all escalates until it's not so innocent anymore.

So in classic greener grass mentality, married women miss the rush and single women miss the blah. I miss sleeping like spoons with someone whose arm fits over my waist as comfortably as my blanket. Someone whose sleeping sounds are as familiar to me as the songs on an overplayed CD from my college years. I miss Sunday afternoons and evenings when doing nothing together constitutes a very fine plan. I miss rummaging around for dinner fixings and deciding at the last minute to order takeout instead. I miss the banter over coffee, the crossing paths with a fly by kiss, the bed head hair, the bickering, the person reading over my shoulder, the safe, soft place to lean on the airplane, the dreams and plans. I miss somebody worrying if I'm late. I miss the smell of shaving cream and tiny flecks of hair in the sink. I miss getting bored and trying to spice things up. I miss being a family.

See, dating is nothing like this. Dating is more like frosting with no cupcake.

I can admit that it's nice sometimes to have cereal for dinner or shave my legs when I feel like it, or discipline or love my children consistently -- my way. I can decide how I spend my money, my vacations and my free time. I have a lot of freedom. But I think it's possible to have that kind of freedom within the confines of relationship, when it's the right relationship. I used to watch my babysitter plop on the sofa with my kids while they ate pizza and watched Animal Planet as I was about to leave on a date and I'd wish that I could pay my sitter to go on my date instead. I wanted to snuggle and watch TV with my kids while she determined if the guy was a chump or worth missing a night with my peeps. I wonder if there are rates for that sort of thing? Let's face it, the guy for me would likely rather stay home and eat pizza and watch Animal Planet, too.

It's ironic that a married woman might sit on her sofa, eating pizza and watching cable with her family and seethe or pine to be doing something else, someplace else, with someone else.

The whole greener grass mentality is loaded and somewhat dangerous. We peek across the fence into each other's yards and we wonder. We see lush green grass and we are too far away to notice the weeds, or the water bill. Sometimes greener grass is just rye grass; green for a season, then gone.

It's good to remember that our own gardens are worth tending.

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