Dating

When you go through a divorce, you get a lot of people asking you if you've met somebody new. Pretty quickly, this question comes up. Even before your divorce is final. Here's my answer.

One thing I knew for sure when Dan and I decided to get a divorce—I wasn't interested in any kind of relationship until the divorce was final. As long as I was married on paper, I was going to honor that status.

The DivorceCare curriculum recommends you wait one year to date for every four years you were married. For me, this means one year—October. But they also have a checklist of how to tell when you're "ready," and by those standards I was ready a while ago. I think one thing DivorceCare doesn't really acknowledge in general as they talk about healing is that healing looks different when you were struggling in your marriage, as opposed to being surprised by an affair when you thought everything was fine. Much like losing a loved one to a long battle with cancer vs. a sudden car accident, you grieve differently.

All that to say, I'm neither waiting for October to be open to dating, nor am I planning to start actively looking to date in October.

One of my friends asked me if I'd found any possibly dates, and I said no. He said, "Do you have your fishing pole out?"

"Of course not!" I responded. "I'm the fish! I'm not fishing!"

I've done a lot of initiating in my life. I learned the hard way that this set me up to be the leader in my marriage, and that's not the way I want any possible future relationships to be. So I'm not planning to put out any fishing poles—ever. I'm open to whatever God may have for me, and if that means a life of singleness, I really am OK with that. I've finally realized something I never realized in my pre-married single life (aka my hunt for a husband era): I am a whole person. I don't need to find my "other half." I am complete in Christ.

But if God plans for me to eventually date and even remarry, I'm OK with that too. But I'm not seeking it out. I'm seeking the kingdom of God and a righteous life. I'm seeking to be like Jesus and fall more in love with him each day. And if God brings along a man to do this alongside of me, I'm open to that. But it won't be that I "found" a man, because I'm not looking. I will not set the precedent that I'm the pursuer, the fisher, the leader. God is the one who's going to bring a man with enough initiative to pursue me if that's God's plan for me.