Quickly, twilight was dimming down the warmth and visibility of our late afternoon walk. Thanksgiving was a week away. But my mind was digging into the archives of 2006. Back to another walk on this same park road also during the thinning veil of fall. It was a Friday, the eve of Halloween. I was 46, and this time I walked alone, sliced by gusty winds while I swiped at rapid-flowing streams of tears.

My 20-year marriage ended 3 years earlier and my first post-divorce relationship, a two-year on-again-off-again, had crashed for good two months back. I’d just seen him drive by with another woman riding shotgun. The woman that I am at 60 looked back at that drama, internally nodding with satisfaction how far I’d come in my emotional maturity.

Eight months after that breakup, I’d meet another man, date him for three years then marry one month past my 50th birthday. That particularly fraught marriage ended a year later, just months following my father’s death. My father’s passing would gift me with hindsight on my male relationships, a lens of which I continue, to this day, to focus.

I’d spend the next five years in an unexpected odd couple of a relationship that provided a lifetime’s worth of deep healing, much of that I had not known I needed so badly. For the two years that followed, I danced life, by choice, blissfully solo.

Ready to enter back into the foray, at the launch of 2019, I’d couple with someone from my distant alma mater. Nearly a year later, the ending was quick and surprising. But, I loved deeper than I’d ever before. I learned who I could be and what an open and honest a relationship felt like when two people are able to be authentic and honest with themselves and each other.

It took another fall of anguish to heal. When 2020 dawned, I ventured for the first time ever into the complex, bizarre, uber-fast-paced world of online dating. The experience was exhilarating, confusing, exhausting. Nothing stuck because I now know because I was not ready. No matter, COVID put the kibosh on it all anyway. I went inward to do more soul-searching, more internal house cleaning. It has been intense. I threw out a dumpster’s worth of patriarchy I had no idea I had embedded within me.

2021, I am looking at you wondering how you will deliver and how I will maneuver. I am open. Ready.*

*Yet bracing myself for more the potential necessity of extended patience, waiting, wading through COVID. So be it.