The Dating Dad

Doors and Windows: November, 2008

Last week, my baby sister called me on her drive from the courthouse, where she’d filed divorce papers. She sounded okay at first, as much as I could tell. I was at the gym, but I knew it was an important day for her, so I walked away from the weight bench and stood by a floor-to-ceiling window, the roiling autumn clouds coming in off the mountains looking like they’d picked up and mixed pigments from the changing leaves on their journey, with patches of deep red and bright orange, but mostly espresso swirls promising dirty weather.

She was headed to a girlfriend’s house to do martinis or cosmos or something. She went from circumspect to suddenly silent, and I knew she was crying. Filing the papers was a milestone in a long, troubled denouement, but it didn’t make the experience less painful. I knew she would be happier soon — probably happier than she’d been in years — but there was no way for her to know it yet.

“Stop and pick up some good champagne,” I told her. “Not that cheap balloonist crap we used to drink after weekend flights. Something good and pricey.” I told her to frame the evening’s plans as a celebration, not a get-drunk-to-numb-the-day bender. She’d made a definitive step toward a better life, and it was time to start thinking about it that way.

“You’re all open doors,” I said. “And windows, too!”

She didn’t own a house, or even a car. They didn’t have a kid. She was a human yard sale, and everything was up for grabs. I told her not to make any big decisions for a while, but to enjoy the lightness that her decisive move had allowed her.

I wish someone had been able to tell me, six years ago, how, after a period of mourning, and some serious disorientation, my life would become richer and funnier and more rewarding than I could possibly imagine. That maybe I hadn’t chosen to get divorced, but that my world would open up like a morning glory, all gorgeous and joyful, and I wouldn’t even recognize my old life or ever want it back.

It made me think of the four best things about the last six years:

1.    My relationship with the girl
It’s wonderful and terrible to parent a child on your own, even if you only have her half the time. If you’re a single parent, you’re already nodding. The highs — the two of us splashing together on the beach, or reading at bedtime, or warm and snuggly under a blanket watching Saturday morning cartoons — cannot be translated into human language. We don’t have to share each other with anyone during those times. Would I like to enjoy new experiences with a third member of the family? Would I love, love, love to smile over Simone’s head at someone we both adore while the three of us walk hand-in-hand? Hell, yes. But my alone time with Simone is truly magical.

Most of the time. The lows can be as abysmal as the highs are high. And when I’m up all night with a vomiting girl, or when she smashes her toe at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and I have to calm her down, sling her over my back and lug her to first aid (with her screaming along the way that she doesn’t want to go), well, it would be awfully nice to have some backup.

But the most challenging times, when it’s the just two of us struggling to make our way through the world together, make us stronger. The rough times have forged a bond between us that many dads don’t get with their kids. It’s so worth it (looking back).

2.    A network of love and support like I’ve never experienced before
I’ve written about it in the past, but it can’t be undersold. I’ve never had such a circle of friends; both those with whom I speak almost daily, and the ones in my ambient awareness—a community of people who care what happens to us, who revel in my love for Simone, and in whom I feel the sense of safety and confidence that allows me to take personal and professional risks. I truly owe my recent successes to this web of unconditional regard that keeps me buoyed in even the worst of times (especially when they tell me I’m being a total ass). It’s a miracle to me.

When I was married, we kept close to a few friends, but I never felt part of a larger community. Life is so different, and so much better, to have so many people I love and care for, so many people I can count on. Simone and I definitely have a village.

3.    The stories
Seriously. You’ve read a bunch of them in the last several years. My life has become a series of touching, silly, near-tragic, and, occasionally, romantic tales.

Recent example?

A few weeks ago, a former colleague asked me to help him get a crowd to a favorite local bar that was having a grand re-opening. He made me a host on his Facebook event page, and I invited a healthy number of FB friends to meet me at 9p.m. (on a non-Simone Saturday night) for open bar and free apps.

I was the first to arrive, so I settled in with my first free cocktail, bumping the bartenders a few bucks for their trouble. Within minutes, a couple of my female friends arrived, including Simone’s favorite after-school teacher from kindergarten. Then the Bombshell showed up with a crowd of her girlfriends (I’ve never known her to turn down a grand opening party). And then my BFF showed up. Another circle of women friends arrived moments later. (Full disclosure: roughly 0% of the women there had any romantic interest in me.)

By the time my former colleague had a chance to come by and say hello, I was amidst almost two dozen of my invited guests, and every single one was an easy-on-the-eyes woman. The look on my friend’s face was perfect. It was an epic moment in my carousing career.

My life of the last six years has a surfeit of “that could only happen to you, Eric” stories; of incidents and coincidences and encounters that stretch credibility, even for me.

4.    The Dating Dad
I was always a writer, and my first book was published before the divorce. But the pain and pleasures of my grief- and cocktail-addled emergence into a new life added grooves and ridges, a patina of darkness and color, to my creative output. My writing grew more textured and honest, fecund and plaintive. And my commitment to keep Dating Dad as candid as possible (while maintaining the privacy of those around me) made the column something that other single parents, both newly out of the gate and veterans, have found worth reading. I found a community of committed, loving parents who are muddling through just like me, and we’ve provided each other with encouragement along the way.

Truly, it’s been six years of wonder.

I hope I can help my sister understand that her life is just starting, and that she has much to look forward to; that the grief and the regret will fade, and sprawling vistas of possibility will open up before her.

But I’m not sure I would have believed it. She’ll just have to see for herself.

Best Married Friend: October, 2008

Asking for forgiveness isn’t an easy thing to do, but it’s an essential part of my autumn. Every year, between and just before the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I do my best to return to the people I’ve hurt in some way, and admit my regret, and ask for forgiveness.

Some years are tougher than others (if I haven’t gotten to you yet, please forgive me).

This year, though, something special has already happened. In the early days of the Dating Dad, my best married friend figured prominently in my writing. Because my life had taken such a sudden detour, I struggled with the ways our lives had begun to branch away from each other. His domestic episodes of happiness and difficulty held less and less interest for me as I was launched back into the single life. If I didn’t have Simone, I didn’t want to watch college football at some sports bar (or, worse, with an intact family) on a Saturday evening; I wanted to drift from bar to bar downtown, cocktail to cocktail, sizing up prospects and working up the courage to make advances. When I was Simone-free, I wanted to celebrate being single. I wanted to assuage the loneliness that cut through me everyday with drinks and possibility. In my new existence, the suburban family life seemed like death.

So we didn’t spend as much time together as the years wore on. Occasionally, we’d do family nights, where the daughters would play, and I’d hang with my friend and his wife (who was also very dear to me). Or we’d meet up for sporting events, where we’d limit post-game carousing because of the long drive home to the ‘burbs. My main circle of friends shifted to single coworkers and buddies who lived downtown and wanted to stay out until all hours, no matter what day of the week it was. My life was segmented into on-duty and off-duty times, and overlap between the two was rare.

Finally, when I was able to shrug off the Big Blue House, I found myself shrugging off a 10-year-friendship. In the short term, I was frustrated with his resistance to helping me through the worst move of my life and taken aback at how different our lives had become (his family had just moved further from the city, into a larger house, with more stuff, while I was shifting from a 5-bedroom, 2,500-square foot house in south Denver to a two-bedroom, 1,000-square foot apartment in the heart of the city). My disappointment and exhaustion manifested itself in a very public dismissal of our compatibility—I wondered aloud (too loudly), if our friendship had run its course.

A few weeks later, I received a very angry snail mail letter from my best married friend, stating, in no uncertain terms, what a shallow jerk I had become. My priorities were twisted and I was demonstrating faulty decision-making skills. It was a soul-scraping skewering. He closed with, “We’re done.”

And though I knew I deserved his censure, I was still angry with him. So, in my mind, I accepted responsibility but also the fact that our friendship was over. 

“Screw it,” I thought. “They live too far away, anyway.” But I saved the letter.

We went a full two years without a single word between us, other than my occasional feeble attempt to reach out with “Hey, I miss you in my life” emails, sans explanation or apology. It’s all I could muster, I told myself.

But just last month, at the prodding of my mother, who knew my friend’s absence from my life was still affecting me two years later, I gave him a call. Out of the blue.

In some ways, the conversation was simple—I told him I’d been thinking about him and his family, and asked how things were going, we talked a bit about our lives, we said goodbye—but what wasn’t discussed was very complex. I wasn’t ready to get into it, and he didn’t push. When I clicked to friend him on Facebook, he emailed me an invitation to actually meet and really talk.

I took him up on it, and we met at the Starbucks near my place. The first several minutes were spent like the phone call—catching up on two years of change and adventure; nothing too deep. And then the conversation paused, and my friend looked at me expectantly.

“So…” he trailed off. I smiled. Shrugged my shoulders. The silence didn’t go anywhere. It sat patiently on its haunches, wagging its tail in expectation. It waited. I didn’t know where to start.

But my friend did. He explained the deep sense of hurt he felt from that fateful column, not just from what I said, but from the very public way in which I said it. I launched into an explanation—my frustration, the fact that those were the worst months of my entire life, and that I knew I hadn’t reached out to him the way a friend should, how self-centered I’d been because times were so fraught and troubled and painful. I explained it all.

And he said, “Okay… and…?”

And I apologized.  I told him I was sorry. I didn’t ask for an apology from him for letting me feel abandoned during a critical moment, I didn’t push for him to accept a part of the falling out. The real crime was the public way in which I vented my frustration.

So now, in this column, I’m very publicly announcing my dumbassness. I’m sorry, my friend. Thank you for giving me a chance to apologize.

I’m glad we’re talking again.

Game Face: September, 2008

A few years ago, I wrote about how much fun dating was for me. I loved the potency of meeting someone new, where anything was possible, and I enjoyed the many opportunities for interesting conversations, for excitement, for the thrill that came with a first smile or a first kiss. I told my other single friends to lighten up; I said that they were making themselves miserable by setting high expectations for every first date.

Lately, I’ve been having that same conversation with my baby sister, who’s navigating the shoals of singlehood after 15ish years of being with the same guy; reminding her that there’s no point getting wound up about dating when she’s so fresh out of the gate—when a relationship is the last thing she needs or wants right now—and to stop second-guessing herself or analyzing every text message and phone call. To just enjoy the possibilities and diversity and new stories to tell.

Strangely, though, I’m not so much in that place anymore. I’m struggling with dating fatigue. The parts I found really fun—the lead-up from first encounter to first date, the back-and-forth “does he?” “does she?” ambiguity, the game of the unsaid and the lightning-strike heart-skip when the mutual spark revealed itself in the return of a kiss or the mention of future shared experiences—tend to seem more like necessary steps than pleasures of the hunt.

It’s equal portions of past disappointment (when that mutual spark turned out to be fueled by vodka-tonics or was explained away as a brief abandonment of reality), nearly six years on the rollercoaster (it’s not so much the highs and the lows as the changes in altitude that wear a person down), and, I guess, a general decay of faith that the effort will amount anything (I really don’t want to do this forever, but when will I be satisfied?).

My threshold for drama and histrionics is low these days, and my weakness for crazy women with messy backstories has abated (mostly). I’m leaning more toward smart, stable and passionate—someone who complements my own mid-level insanity…someone who can talk me off the ledge.

One of my favorite SpongeBob Squarepants episodes (I know, I know) is all about Spongebob’s beleaguered neighbor Squidward moving away to a gated community where everything seems to be perfect. He spends his days reveling in the self-satisfaction of an egghead existence—riding his bike to the corner store to buy his favorite canned bread, doing interpretive dance, playing clarinet in a quartet. What I love is the montage sequence, where you see him doing these things day after day, the perky music and the smile on his face both gradually drooping over time until all of the things he found so joyful have just become a slog.

Sometimes dating feels like a slog for me. Like, if you did a montage of my face over the last five-plus years, you’d see that grin and sense of wonder from the early days slowly melt into a “here we go again” grimace. You’d see the slow-but-steady transition from a loose, happy, open-faced smile to the tight, forced game face of someone jumping through hoops because there’s no other way to get to the other side.

Sometimes I want to skip from that first meeting, where potential fills the air like the moments before an electrical storm, to the fourth or fifth date, where we both know something important and wonderful has begun, and we’re curled around each other on the couch in front of a movie, the remnants of chicken panang and pad thai forgotten, the bottle of wine nearly empty, we have that easy use of the word “we” in conversations about travel or visiting the newest restaurant in town, and the rest of the evening (all the way to breakfast) is understood with a mix of contentment and anticipation.

But that’s not how dating works—you have to muddle through the doubt and uncertainty, the getting-to-know-you encounters (where you can only disclose so much admiration for each other) and the job interview questions before you can really enjoy the sense that something between you is established and has momentum. I’ve been on both sides of that spark turning out to be weaker than expected, and there’s wisdom in taking one’s time, especially if the initial chemistry and attraction are so palpable that you can imagine a lifetime of shared experiences.

Given the opportunity, I can feel a sense of connection and potential very quickly, and then realize it’s not going to work just as precipitately. And I know the pain of disorientation when I pull that rapid retreat crap, because I’m on the receiving end as often as I’m giving.

I remember an amazing weekend, where everything seemed to fall into place. It was a setup situation where we met and connected immediately. Our first date began in the late afternoon and didn’t end until early the next morning (not what you're thinking — like 2am, no funny stuff). But that didn’t stop us from spending hours and hours together the next day, finally working next to each other on our laptops, catching each other’s eye in wonder that things could feel so good so quickly, before walking into town for some dinner, occasionally even holding hands as we perambulated.

And two days later, it was all done. The sense of connection was questioned and deemed a temporary departure from reality. In some ways, it was the way we allowed ourselves to abandon the rational and just be happy in the moment that actually killed the thing. It was too much, too fast for her, and being in the “real world” of spreadsheets and measured decisions caused her to look back at the weekend in disbelief.

So, yeah, I understand the importance of measured steps.

But, crap, it’s exhausting!

It’s easy to imagine giving in and settling for a certain percentage of satisfaction and calling it good enough. But I’ve never lived my life that way. “Good enough” is a compromise I’ve never been willing to embrace, in love or work (or friends or travel or literature or hot dogs). It’s a principle that has taken its toll on me and those around me. But that’s the way I’m wired.

So, over it or not, I’m keeping my game face on.