by JoAnneh Nagler

I stood at an altar and married the same man twice. That’s right, two times. The second time, it was more than a dozen years after we’d broken up. 

What would make me do that? Why?

I mean, if the thing had run careening across the railroad tracks the first time, what would make me think I could patch things together a second time with my oh-so-scotched-taped-together skills at love?

We divorced for all the same reasons most couples break up. Trouble with money, not listening, shoving things under the rug, needing to win, and the deadening sexual fallout from all of it. 

After our break, I moved 400 miles away, took a breath for some months, then started dating. I was game, I wanted a long-term love affair, something genuine and lasting and loving. I knew my husband and I had had something real, but there’d been something missing, too. A willingness to be all-in, to give ourselves over.

It was a quality I knew I was going to have to search for.

There were, in my dating life—what would I call them?—searching highlights.

The accident-prone guy—lovely sense of humor—who jumped out of airplanes, barefoot skied in the ocean at fifty degrees, made a living by chain-sawing blocks of wood into sculptures, who bragged, ‘I’ve been to the hospital nine times in the past year!’ When my eyes grew big as flying saucers, he said, ‘What’s the big deal? You’re not scared of adventure, are you?’ 

In seconds he was standing up on his restaurant chair (to show me his balance?)—‘Get down!’ I hissed—then jumped off in a poolside-cannonball shape, planning to land on his feet. Instead, he crashed his right arm into the table, breaking his limb. (No happy-ending date that night, ladies. Seven hours in the emergency room instead.) Next.

Then, there was the guy who kissed my feet in the middle of a swanky restaurant on a first date. He told me, ‘I’ve got a thing for feet…can’t date a woman unless I like her toes…’ He reached for my calf, slipped my high-heeled pump off, pulled my foot into his belly. 

I flinched, but he was faster, palming my toes. ‘Um—hey!’ I said. ‘I’m not really comfortable with this…’ 

I tugged, but he was stronger.

‘Put it down,’ I whispered, the push-pull of my leg framing the side of our white-tableclothed two-top. ‘I mean it!’ 

Eyes flashed our way.

‘Oh, come on!’ he bellowed, aiming a couple of toes for his mouth.

I yanked, my ankle flew, and his eggplant parmesan landed squarely in his lap. Oops. He pouted like a twelve-year-old through the rest of dinner. Next, next.

There was the man who had terminal cancer—three months, he was given, poor soul—who wanted to get married after his first-date confession; the guy who’s job kept him away 322 days of the year (a big no thanks); the date who swore he was over his ex-wife, but took four phone calls from her during dinner.

In the aftermath, I asked myself, numerous times: Why did I sit there? I would’ve been better off rambling through the restaurant kitchen, pulling the first virile-looking man off the chef’s line, taking my chances. 

There were lesser dating faux paus, too. Oversteps that made me bristle and recoil. At a chi-chi seafood restaurant set over a koi pond in Beverly Hills, whole garlic crabs in our hands (me sporting a huge bib over my thoughtfully chosen cocktail dress), my pre-sex, third-date guy dropped a bomb. ‘I want you to home school my kids.’ 

Huh? We were supposed to consummate the thing that night, a first try. My desire dropped instantly from my pelvis into my shoe. 

The guy was a doctor, used to getting his way when he gave an order, but, really? On a third date?I hadn’t met his kids, and—let’s just say it—his assumptions were mind-spinningly off-base. 

I stared at the unusual floor of the restaurant below me, which was like standing on an aquarium; through the clear plexiglass below my heels, bright orange koi swam placidly. I looked at my date and stammered, ‘I’m not really qualified to…I mean, I don’t feel I have the skills to—’

What the hell was I saying? There was no way, in any sane universe, that this non-sequitur was normal on a third date. Home schooling kids I hadn’t even met? With a man I hadn’t even been intimate with? Why even discuss it?

‘Well, maybe you’re just selfish!’ he quipped.

‘Enough!’ I yelled, pushing my chair back with some force. ‘Just—enough!’ The koi scattered in split-seconds beneath my feet, flying for safety. I followed their lead and got the hell out of there. 

I needed a warmer ocean and a more reasonable geography for love, for sure. Or at least not a crazy one. 

As a divorced dater, that was becoming harder and harder to find.

I called my ex-husband, asked him why he wasn’t dating. ‘Everyone’s got too much baggage and I just can’t take it,’ he said.

I pondered that for an evening. If he was right, wouldn’t that rule out all of us? We’re all carrying bags-full of our histories. And my dates hadn’t looked like unstable men. They had good jobs, excelled at their crafts, had kids, owned things. 

But after a few laps in the dating pool, all I could think of was, are we all just drowning here?

Then a wise woman friend said something simple: ‘It only takes one. That’s all.’ Yes. She was right. I didn’t need twenty men for partnering to work out. Just one stable-ish, attractive-spirited, not-worn-out, un-crazy, kind soul. Surely there was one?

That got me thinking. What did I really need in a partner? What was my criteria for my ‘one’—my values for a relationship?

After some digging, I came up with a simple list: kindness, thoughtfulness, culture, liberalism, love, sensuality, willingness.

Enter my ex-husband. We’d never lost touch; he was still the person who sensed, somehow, to call me when I was having a good cry, sitting on my kitchen floor and wailing into a dishtowel.

‘I’m a cataclysmic mess,’ I wept one evening. 

‘You’re not.’ He said. ‘You never were. Well…maybe in the kitchen,’ he chuckled. Kindness, yes. Laughter.

Every once in a while, I’d get a little package in the mail with a note that read, ‘I know you love polka-dots, so I found these cool, polka-dotted salt shakers for you.’ Thoughtfulness.

An article on art would show up in my mailbox from The New Yorker, the pages ripped out of his preciously-guarded magazines. Culture, yes. I called him to discuss who we were voting for—liberalism—and, on every call, he still told me he loved me. Love, yes. 

I’d get off a phone call or walk away from my mailbox thinking, why did we break up? What was so unworkable with this guy?Was it possible to have all that good stuff again? Our sex had run aground with our issues, all the usual marital fighting grounds. But it had been good once, too. 

I went to see him. ‘Let’s have lunch,’ I said into the phone.

‘Dinner,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick you up, we’ll go into the city.’ 

Over a checkered Italian tablecloth, he clinked my glass. ‘My mother loves you. She misses you.’ 

I burst out laughing. ‘Does she want to marry me? She’s single. Tell her I love her back.’

He gripped my hand. ‘I think we should try again. Worst that can happen is that we end up never speaking again, but since that didn’t happen the first time, I think we can safely bet we won’t burn down the house.’

It struck me, in my heart. Took the breath out of me, too. Try again? Could we really?

I moved north to be with him. In the first days, he’d barely cleaned out one closet for me—I was pissed, that was an argument—and then I burned my arm on the side of the oven in the flat’s tiny kitchen, my butt pressed up against the refrigerator to open the damned thing. 

‘I can’t do this!’ I yelled, running down the freezing street barefoot in my T-shirt and fraying shorts, my arms flailing. ‘I’m not cut out for this!’ 

He ran after me, my dishtowel flying madly toward him in the wind. ‘Come back! We’ll work it out!’ he shouted. He caught me by the shoulders, held me. ‘Come back with me,’ he whispered, purring in my ear. More willingness. Okay.

The first time around, our ten-year age difference never came up. It wasn’t an issue when we were 25 and 35. But now, our dinner guests were well into their fifties and had tales to tell: intricate aging stories over plates of no-wheat, Atkins-inspired entrees. ‘Bill and Sally Ann were cycling in France—I mean, they were cycling!—miles and miles all over the country—and Bill just dropped dead. He was healthy as a horse!’ 

After one dinner, I said, ‘Look, I’m still in my forties. I’m not ready to have conversations about people having heart attacks on bike trips!’ But the feeling passed, a puff of smoke as I settled into the slower pace of what it might be to age gracefully with a lover, the gift of having each other at all. 

There were hilarities and negotiations, too: me falling off my high heels in a heightened sexual moment, in flagrante delicto—‘Whoa!’—the two of us landing on top of each other on the area rug, banging our shins on my stilettos. Hours of hammering out who would do what around the house (we divided the shopping; he got laundry and dishes, I’d do the cooking.) Days where we couldn’t figure out how to plunge the stopped-up sink, then suddenly—four hands grabbing the plunger—a murky vegetable-laden mulch erupted into our faces, both of us landing in a heap of laughter on the kitchen floor.  

‘We’re hopeless,’ I said. 

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but hopeless and in love.’

There is, sometimes, an essential genius in our original choosing, and I felt it just then, splattered with gunk and laughing in his arms. Even though it hadn’t worked out the first time, the core of it was good, sweet. Close. I learned that from my dating, too. That the bright, kind, openhearted click of a genuine connection is real—and so are the red-flag, not-clicking attempts, too; the ‘walk away’ messages. I’m meant to listen to both. And when I’m willing to hold genuine closeness up to the light of my true values, it has a chance to spark and groove and sing and dance itself into a real love.

At our second wedding, our officiant played Sinatra’s The Second Time Around, and there were lots of we-were-there-for-the-first-marriage jokes at the reception. But mainly, there was love. Beauty in the best sense—a newly acquired sight for what was good, what was worth it. 

But it was more than hope and faith that changed things. It was work, too.

That second time—this time—we had a plan. We became willing to do things that made our noses turn up, had us make faces at each other; stuff we had no desire to do at all, but did for the good of the relationship. We talked, thirty minutes by the timer, about how things were going. We lived on our simple incomes, no debt, no credit cards. (A game-changer; a huge item on the what-we-no-longer-fight-about list.) We joined a couples’ group, got comfortable with letting our emotional slips show in front of others, which helped us talk honestly when we were alone. We scheduled time so both of us got to do the artistic things that move our souls, gave each other room.

Now, we’re down the road a decade-and-a-half, and those first days of learning how to be a pliable and all-in adult partner seem distantly pleasant, a cache of funny memories. But when I sit still and remember, I know we had everything on the line. A second chance, yes. But that wasn’t enough. We had to get willing, to let the marriage lead us, to give up needing to win, to learn to listen—to really hear, and then to change for the good of us.

That ‘us’wasn’t present our first time around. It was only the germ of a seed that had not yet sprouted or turned its face to find the sun. This second time, we didn’t change our personalities, and didn’t, with the choice to try again, suddenly lose every stubborn or resistant bone in our bodies. We carried all of that over the threshold, back into the same nine-hundred-square-foot flat we’d lived in before we parted. 

What we gave up was stridency. We became willing—to try, to fail, and to try again; to be wholly alive to each other, to turn towards each other, not away. And then, to laugh at our follies, and take joy in the blind good luck we got doused with to fall in love again, all-in this time.

JoAnneh Nagler is the author of the fiction collection Stay with Me, Wisconsin (Coyote Point Press, 2022) featured in Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2022, winner of The Global Book Award, The Eric Hoffer Book Award, a Montaigne Medal finalist, and story nominated for The Pushcart Prize for Fiction. She has authored three nonfiction books: How to Be an Artist Without Losing Your Mind, Your Shirt, or Your Creative Compass (W.W. Norton); Naked Marriage (Skyhorse Publishing); and The Debt-Free Spending Plan (HarperCollins), two of which were Amazon Top-100 titles. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, Essence Magazine, Medium.com, LiveStrong Magazine and many more. Recently awarded the League of PEN Women Achiever Award, she wrote and directed the play Ruby and George in Love (Sonoma Arts Live Theatre Company), and composed two singer-songwriter albums, I Burn and Enraptured, available in all outlets. In television, she’s written screenplays for Schrodinger’s Cat Productions and major networks, worked development for ABC Pictures, and wrote special projects for Rob Reiner. Her recent literary work has appeared in the journals Persephone, New Haven Review, Glimmer Train, Gold Man Review, You Might Need to Hear This, and Mobius. She is a founding member of The Pacific Coast Writer’s Collective, and has completed a new novel, Under the Key West Moon. www.AnArtistryLife.com.