Dating : Finding Love for The First Time in My Third Marriage

To make sure of this, I found a tall house in the woods overlooking Lake Tahoe, where for nearly twenty-five years I devoted myself to skiing, fly fishing, hiking, and the company of a few friends, assiduously avoiding any further entanglement with a woman.

While I lived the life of a hermit, a thousand miles away in a small New Mexico town a white haired woman in her seventies suddenly took an interest in a Facebook page for a book I had recently published. For many years, she too committed herself to being single, after a series of her own marital disasters. Because she used an alias, I had no idea who she was when we began to correspond, but when she revealed her true identity I was floored. She was the girl I had fallen in love with in high school so many years before!

Within a few weeks, we were together. Within months, we were married. It had been over sixty years since we graduated and went our separate ways, yet here we were together so many years later.

How could something so wonderful come about?

Each of us had reproached ourselves for the disastrous decisions we’d made in marrying the wrong people. Yet, as we talked to one another about it, we realized, from a perspective of nearly eight decades, that our marital boo-boos hadn’t really been “mistakes” at all.

Our less than wholly desirable liaisons had forced us to learn more about ourselves, something we’d doubtless have avoided under pleasanter circumstances. Rough edges needed smoothing. Arrogance needed the humbling experiences marriage so readily provides. What finally became clear to us is that we simply had to have something to occupy ourselves for those sixty years when we were apart!