Over pancakes, coffee mug between her hands, eyes intent on mine, my mom gave me the apology I never wanted.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I misled you.”
That she was apologizing told me even she had stopped holding out, believing what we both wanted to be true for me: that the right man would come along.
It had been her maternal mantra throughout my dating life, which had, by that point, stretched on for 25 years.
“It’s just that that’s what happened with Daddy and me,” she said.
They both had partners the first time they met. A year later, a fender bender on the street in front of my grandmother’s house brought the police, and the dispatched officer, my father, now single. My mother, now also single, brushed her hair before going downstairs.
It is because of their giggling, his hilarious aura in a 6'6" frame, our family’s cocoon, on the couch watching nature shows, that I came to believe in magic.
That an accident also tore them apart—my father killed at work as a construction site supervisor when they were both in their 40s—should have been my first clue.
On the edge of the bell curve in mental health (anxiety, ADHD) and physical size (5'10", thanks for the man hands, Dad), I had a hard time feeling lovable outside my family. But my mom told me I could relax into a faith about this part, this Right Man coming along.
Though I’ve had a series of years-long and often fulfilling relationships, he didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t. He wasn’t the lead singer, of course, not the co-worker, not my next-door neighbor in the Peace Corps, nor my longtime friend, though even if each of them felt at a time as though they could be Him. And then, when I was 36, after my closest friends had celebrated their 10-year wedding anniversaries, finally, He arrived. As they say, when you know, you know. I felt as if I’d finally been invited to join the human race. We entered into that stage of relationship I’d never heard talked about, but felt—he became my family. He became my home.
For the first time in my life, I felt safe enough to fantasize about being a bride, how we would dance to “At Last” at our destination wedding on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. My lonely days were over.
Until he informed me two years into our relationship, via email, that he was not the right man, after all. As shocking as my father’s shoes in the hallway without him the day he died, the man formerly known as The Right Man disappeared from my life, as, it turns out, anyone, at any time, is allowed to do. That whole time, he had simply been a man.
I had been battered by love before. This felt like brute-force amputation. My him-shaped phantom limb pulsed and ached, no matter what I did, the wound refusing to close, for a year, then another, then another, and yet another, until a sign at TJ Maxx about never-ending love read like a threat.
My mom, trying to soothe me about it one day, said, "You'll find love when you're not looking."
"I DON'T…" I yelled, my voice exploding out of my pain. I softened, "…want to hear that."
I'd blown up at her, my sweet, widowed, retired elementary-school teacher, monarch butterfly-rearing mom. She didn’t deserve that, did she?
For the first time I considered that perhaps some ember of anger burned there. Some blame. For all the nature shows we’d watched together, how could she have missed that we’re not in a storybook? We, too, are in a jungle.
“That was me saying my hopeful wish for you,” she told me later. And who but the bitterest of them all could fault her for that?
I try to hold my rage gently. This time, I’m not just grieving a relationship. I’m grieving a faith. Of all the religions I’ve left, this was the one I’d clung to longest.
Of course the right man might not come along. Did I think I was so different from the people everywhere who never got married? The women around the world sold away from the chance to find Mr. Right? The ostriches flapping their wings and pirouetting, hoping a male would notice? Why would they have evolved to dance if the right ostrich would just come along?
I singe with regret imagining what I would have done differently if I hadn’t been a believer. Perhaps I would have sooner cut off relationships that I could see weren’t going anywhere. But why rush decisions when the right man would come along either way, when you were living a written story, rather than playing life’s most high-stakes game of musical chairs?
Perhaps I would have taken better care with the man I assumed was my destiny in human form, checked in about us, asked. Perhaps I wouldn’t have swiped away the notification so often, the alert I set to remind myself each Friday to write him a love note, which lost the battle of my attention to so many deadlines.
Most sanely, what do I do now? Pirouette?
I am not giving up, but I am giving in to the reality that some people go through life without a partner. I'm not alone in this, as predictions estimate the percentage of women aged 25-44 who will be single by 2030 at 45%.
I'm trying to see it not as something that happened to me, but simply something that happens. I myself have broken up with people who thought I was The Right Woman. I have scalded lives, amputated myself from others, even. I was never The Right Woman, either. I was only ever a woman.
A surprisingly wonderful man might come along and find me surprisingly wonderful, and fit all my unapologetically high-standard criteria and I his, or perhaps not. Even if he arrives, I might lose him again, in any number of possible ways. Life itself is a wild animal.
I want to be the kind of person who’s still open to magic. Yet also, if this is my life—singleness—I want to be the kind of person who accepts her fate and truly lives it.
I’m not waiting to find out who he is, and in some way, who I am.
Actually, that is what I’m doing.
What I mean is it’s time to do something else.
This is my work now: to create a life without a placeholder, something fully filled in. I had no serious Plan B, I realized. I’ve just waited for half my life for Him to appear.
I have other blessings to build on, even if they’re not the plot of seemingly every movie, show or song.
As my mom and I traveled together one summer, she popped in as a guest speaker to an online class I was teaching. We bantered and I put my head on her shoulder, then noticed some of the students looking at us with a longing not unlike the one that’s probably slipped onto my face as I watched women who have what I don’t.
After my mom left our class, one woman said in a soft voice, “I’m jealous.”
This is what the dice of life have rolled my way, and not hers: a mother who feels like a best friend, who sees me in such a way that she couldn’t conjure a possibility other than that of me being cherished for life by the perfect person. I can hardly imagine my own mother doubting whether anyone would love me. Others can hardly imagine what it's like to be loved by their mother.
I try to say thank you, though it’s the last thing the darkest parts of me want to say. I have her, and a patchwork quilt of other loves. I have a career as an artist, a business based around the best of who I am, and a passport. So I’m trying to come back from my tantrums. Accept. Surrender.
And not exactly to forgive. I choose not to blame my mom in the first place for believing in the best for me. I choose to simply march on, with a new compass, a new map.
The question became, no longer when will He come along, but rather what would I do if I accepted, fully, that it might just be me?
Apparently, one part of the answer is to move to New York City. I need to be in a place where the gravitational field has more than one sun.
During a vacation the summer before I packed up, I asked my mom what she thought of the move. Her eyes, intent on mine, smiled.
“I’m so happy for you,” she said, and perhaps no one else in my life will look at me the way she's looking at me now, with that unconditional love I never have to question, but here it is, in this moment. “I think it’s exactly where you should be."
I flew back to visit, of course, when she got re-married to a wonderful man (that she met on the apps) at 74.
Paulette Perhach is an award-winning author and writing coach with work in The New York Times, Elle and Vox, as well as founder and CEO of Powerhouse Writers.
Do you have a personal essay you want to share with Newsweek? Send your story to [email protected].
