Divorce as a Beginning, Not an End
There's a lot of fun, silly and sexy stuff that comes with starting new.
It’s been a crazy few months over here.
Let me start by introducing myself.
Please call me Loretta. No, that’s not my real name — I’m giving you a fake name so I can tell you real stories. I’m a mother in my mid-40s and I have just separated from my husband, whom I’ve been married to for more than a decade. I’m not going to share all the sordid reasons for our separation, but we are going through mediation now and doing okay. We’ll be sharing custody of our two amazing boys.
This newsletter won’t be full of divorce sob stories, although I do plan to be honest about my feelings, which, sure, could sometimes get messy. But no — this newsletter is about new beginnings: my quest for midlife self-discovery, the work I am doing to deprogram myself from patriarchal expectations and ideas, and my adventures as I strive to build a new, joy-filled, untethered life. I’m with
Lenz, the author of This American Ex-Wife, in thinking that we should stop telling people “I’m sorry” when they’re getting divorced and start throwing parties for them instead.Divorce is not failure. It’s liberation.
What do I want in my new life? I want deep friendships. I want new hobbies. I want to travel more. And I want sex. My ex would almost certainly scoff at this last one, because I never had much of a libido during our marriage. But since we separated, my sex drive has … well … shot through the roof. I hope to have lots of fun quenching it, although the idea is also more than a little terrifying. I don’t really know how to hook up in 2024 — jfc there are so many new terms! — so I’m going to make mistakes, and I’m going to look silly. And that’s okay. I refuse to hide my head in shame. Instead, I’ll unapologetically share my blunders here and you can laugh along with me.
This is not a dating Substack. I don’t want another relationship — at least, not right now, and probably not for a while. This newsletter will not be the diary of my quest to find a new partner. Before I married, I was a serial monogamist, dating one guy, then another, then another until I found “The One.” Every time I met a new guy, I considered him a potential mate, and I realize now that this shaped my behavior and self-identity in ways that made me lose myself. I was constantly trying to mold myself into someone I considered lovable — I was careful not to be too assertive, too smart, too needy, lest I scare a potential future husband off.
These tendencies are, sadly, fairly ingrained in me now, but I’m doing my best to unlearn them. I’m doing my best to discover how to be myself, quirks and all, and to accept that this might mean some guys won’t “like” me. That’s fine — because I’m also learning that it’s possible to be assertive and smart and to communicate my needs and expectations and still have lots of fun. And good riddance to the guys who feel threatened by a confident woman who knows herself.
Why “To the Bed”? Soon after splitting up with my ex, I re-watched Moonstruck. The scene in which Cher’s character, Loretta, and Nic Cage’s character, Ronny, first hook up deeply resonated with me. In the scene, Ronny grabs and kisses Loretta in his kitchen, then dramatically picks her up and carries her off. “Where are you taking me?” Loretta moans. “To the bed,” Ronny replies. Her head drops back in ecstasy and resignation as she says “Oh my god. Okay. Okay! I don’t care. Take me to the bed!”
I, like Loretta, am desperately trying to understand and manage my new feelings and desires (while also navigating so many other big life changes). Join me as I share the stories of the various beds I’m taken to — but let me be clear: I plan to be the one leading the bedroom charge much of the time, too.
Love this and frankly love the idea of using a pseudonym! Don’t know if you plan on doing any reported stories or interviews, but I’d love to see stories here or anywhere about non-amicable divorces. The ones that feel less like liberation and more like still being tethered to an ex-spouse but in a whole new territory of legal arbitration and toxicity. No doubt the very nature of these divorces make them hard to write about freely, but as I watch someone v close to me try to navigate this sort of divorce, I feel like it’s a missing piece of divorce lit and I wish it weren’t. (To be clear: I don’t think we need these stories as cautionary tales or reasons not to pursue a divorce, but amicable joint custody and liberation aren’t always on the other side of divorce and for folks really going through it, we need those stories too! How to get free when constantly being surveilled by the father of your children and their evil step mother, et cetera!)
It was a big surprise to me, post-separation, to discover that it wasn’t that I didn’t want sex, it was that I didn’t want sex *with my ex*. Sex with other people is actually terrific.