Based on my own experience, dating after divorce is about time and timing. When it’s right for you, you’ll know. While my guest Debbi Dickinson recommends her clients wait a year before dating after divorce, I’ve interviewed people who have started dating sooner than that and found that dating was part of their healing process.
My present guest, RMJ has been divorced for almost a year and says she isn’t ready to date yet. Here’s RMJ:
I got divorced last February and actually don’t have much of a social life. A lot of my life really revolves around work and then the church, which is a small one. It’s about fifty people. So I’ve not dated at all.
I think I’m okay for now. I need companionship. I’ve always regarded myself as wife material. I always thought I’m the sort of person who is meant to be married. I am meant to have someone in my life and to suddenly find you’re single again at forty, that’s a bit of a shock. You really don’t know where to begin in terms of dating.
I’m also at the point now where I like having a really peaceful life right now. It would be nice to have someone to share it with, but I don’t want to forget what I have because there was a time in my life when my life wasn’t very peaceful and my life was really chaotic because of a partner. I’m trying to just treasure the even keel existence I have right now.
I do not see how I can begin to date right now with the way I currently lead my life but it’s not something I’m overly worried about because as long as I’m excited about my own life, fulfilling my goals so on and so forth, I feel it comes together. I spend my time trying to work on myself and do things that bring me joy, for example, writing my blog.
If I keep doing those things, the right kinds of things, the right kinds of people will eventually come into my life.
I don’t get asked about dating much. I guess it’s because I’m stuck in an office most of the day. Recently a good friend did mention this guy to set me up with and I said, “Oh, no thank you.” I don’t think I’m ready.
But I don’t get a lot of that. Again, remember that my social network is very small. There’s work. I work in a small team surrounded by a larger office and then there’s church. At church, people have different opinions and some people take the view that once you get divorced you don’t have the right to re-marry. I don’t belong to that camp and never have. But that’s almost like an overriding doctrine in the church so, you rarely find people trying to set you up. Not in my church at least.
I’m not bothered by that either. If I really wanted to find a partner, there are many different ways in which one can do that, I’m sure.
Are you ready to date but can’t get started? What’s holding you back? What helped you get back into the dating game?
RMJ blogs at Remembering My Journey were she writes, beautifully about being an African, a Christian and divorced.
Photo Credit: 2013© Jupiter Images Corporation