So you get someplace else to live, and you get new towels and drapes and the cable TV hooked up. A big box of Cheerios and six Lean Cusines. And then you cannot stand to be there. Sooner or later, you meet someone else who cannot stand being at their home either. And you run. Run, run, run. I met the girlfriend of one of the guys in my theater group, and she was freshly divorced too. We went out dancing, dancing, dancing, usually till two in the a.m. Which is remarkable, being as how I can usually go asleep at about 8:30 p.m.
It doesn't have to be bar-hopping. You can get super-involved in almost anything. Volunteering, lawn work, tailgating. Even errands. There's just a restlessness to it all that draws you out, out, out of the house.
It doesn't last forever. And it's not all bad. It teaches you things, about how very little the pick up lines have changed, how exillerating it can be still, at your age, to neck like a banshee. How guilt-riddenly late you can eat supper, how big the dust bunnies under the piano can grow.
And it teaches you, in a physically exhausting way, how to be comfortable in your own skin. That's important work, so that you don't fall right back into a new but awful relationship.
Just remember, it does no good to sew your wild oats if you have to pray for a crop failure afterwards.
It also teaches you, in a very visceral way, that you are out of the old relationship and that you have the freedom to charge straight forward into a Brave New World.
