The embarrassing search for love as a 35-year old nomad
And other thoughts on wallowing, relationships, vagabonding, and what's next after your ex moves on with a 21 year old
Being this heartbroken at 35 is the most wild - nay embarrassing - experience of my adult life.
Not only because I’ve recently said and done some of the most overhanded and vindictive shit I thought could only be reached in the depths of hell — but also because I’m over here trying to close lucrative PR deals with C-suites in Denver conference rooms while simultaneously having to excuse myself to sit on the ground of a corporate bathroom stall with my head propped against the cold beige tile, just to steal five minutes to pull myself together.
I haven’t experienced such acute heartache in 10 years and I’m rapidly deteriorating into some sort of mid-30s millennial Miss Havisham: a workaholic spinster jilted by a Colombian 7 years her junior, who now insists on wallowing in her wedding dress like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Only in this case, there is no wedding dress — just unwashed hair and oversized sweaters as I mope around to Shakira and Bad Bunny (I mean honestly, could this be more bleak) like a tragic anthem of our former life in Medellin.
All this self-induced wallowing you’d think would conjure up some good ole-fashioned loathing towards my ex and his new 21-year old girlfriend, but at this point I’m honestly too tired and burned out to even splice up the rage.
Mostly, I’m consistently dead-eyed lately: egotistical enough that I don’t want him aware of how much I’m hurt, which makes writing this public post a risk, but also at the point where it really doesn’t even matter what he knows or doesn’t. Maybe it’d feed his own ego - maybe he’d feel nothing. It doesn’t matter either way, which only depresses me more.
I think a lot lately about my first experience of grief when my best friend died at 18, nearly 18 years ago now. That grief a totem pole I compare everything painful to throughout life. And while no experience I’ve had can match my best friend falling out of a tree — this particular one I’ll go on the record to say is one of the more gnawing and humbling ones that I’ve lived through in adulthood.
I don’t feel in control of my emotional state, like I’m always just one Spotify song from a 10-minute untethered breakdown: no song spared in my emotional upheaval.
It’s the first time in my adult life I’ve stopped listening to music morning to night and work in silence.
Where I used to login for the day, pull up Spotify and click shuffle on whatever playlist I curated, I really simply … can’t.
I can’t afford time lost to what if’s. I can’t be puffy-eyed and snotty five minutes before a client call.
I’m trying to exist right now maintaining some form of hinged homeostasis: to be focused on doing whatever I can to alleviate spiked cortisol, if only for a few hours.
In turn, I listen to a lot of Crime Junkies podcasts. Odd that I turn to murder and pillaging, but hey - it seems to be a particular calming thing us ladies do.
That and Pilates. Man, my generation of white girls loves Pilates.
—
The most embarrassing part of this whole ordeal is it has already inexplicably been 6 months since we broke up in Colombia and 4 months since we rescinded our lease in Montreal, sold all our (brand new) shit, and I plunged back into the root-less, nomadic lifestyle I had long before I met him.
But, as my therapist reminds me through my ranting, ceaseless ruminating: “neither of you actually cut ties until recently. You’re only now coming to terms with the fact that it’s really over.”
Maybe she’s soothing my embarrassing delulu, maybe she’s blowing smoke up my ass at $195/hour. I’ll choose to believe the former.
But I’m grieving all the same.
—
Lately, when I think about the end — that final beleaguered fight on a Medellin balcony in March — I wonder how I could’ve felt so certain when I said the words: “I’m unwilling to keep going as we are.”
Did I understand how massive the toll would be when I said those words? That I’d lose double digit thousands of dollars in furniture and appliances. That I’d be totally destabilized and without a home again? That the future I dreamed for would vanish overnight? Did I really comprehend the stress of waning fertility?
Probably not, or I likely wouldn’t have gone through with it.
“But you did,” my therapist reminds me. “And you’d felt certain of this long before then.”
She’s correct of course, but in my Miss Havisham groveling it’s hard to find pockets of clarity.
Only that I do remember where I sat when I spoke these words to him. I remember carefully choosing them. And mostly, I remember that I bloody meant them.
I knew that I was done with the relationship, only if I’m being honest with myself, I was really only done with the way we were up to that point.
I still desired our future: I wanted what he could’ve provided. I wanted the life we envisioned.
I just wanted him to grow up and act like it, too.
(And for the relationship terrorism to stop. But that’s for another time.)
When I wrote last week in a now viral post about the complex emotions I’ve had over finding out that he has chosen to move on with a much younger woman - I settled on the conclusion that it really has nothing to do with this girl or her 2002 birth year. And everything to do with my own buzzing insecurity of wanting kids, fretting the final society-deemed “attractive years” for a woman, and unable to - simply put - metaphorically give myself a do-over.
And all that’s true. I’m incensed with jealousy. Enraged by the injustice.
But what I’m also uncovering during my midnight hysteria is the stark realization that his choices after our split (and many long before it) are a hard slap in the face to whatever lingering, wishful narrative I had clung to for our future.
That my self-centered delulu has done absolutely nothing but push me further away from accepting my wayward reality as it is today.
With the introduction of a new girlfriend, there is no way I can continue to gaslight myself, or willfully believe the many proclamations made following our split that promised time for emotional and financial “growth” and maturation so we could find ourselves back together one day like some 2005 Julia Roberts romcom.
(Side note: didn’t that whole era of movies really just fuck up love for our generation of women and men?)
Only now in my whirlwind of self pity am I also forced to contend with the harsh facts that I am truly back to square one: single, flat-footed, embarrassed, dream-less, without a city to call home, and stuck within the waning clock of fertility to have a kid with a suitable partner who I pray I won’t just haplessly choose in a desperate attempt to procreate.
At the heart of all of this, I’m grieving a future I’m never to have and currently unexcited for a future I cannot remotely envision right now, lost at sea with no compass pointing ashore.
Which leads to my next point.
—
Since my break up, I’ve been fighting a philosophical battle with nearly everyone closest to me about what to do next with my life.
I mentioned to my therapist that the worst consequence of this whole thing- outside of allowing myself to be duped by idealism - is that there’s no denying I fucked up in my decision-making. Because of it, I’m left vulnerable: an unarmed soldier in the trenches of everyone’s opinions about what I should do following it.
Worse is the narrative that a significant reason I might have made such a massive err of judgment could be in part due to my previous and current “vagabond” lifestyle choices of being purposely rootless and housing-free these past four years while I’ve been in the van, an Airbnb, Medellin, or living in and out of whatever other country or city that’s lax on cat immigration.
When I met my ex we were in Colombia, and up to our first date I was debating going back to my previous home - Colorado - to do the tokening ‘settling down’ and at least put a deposit on a rental. For months leading up to our meeting I’d had American friends and family in my ear telling that I needed to give up on the idea that I could live the way I do and be able find a stable, grounded partner who’d want the same nomadic lifestyle while also wanting kids.
"A man who’s ready for a family won’t be switching countries every few months,” my dad insisted.
”All you’re going to find is a bunch of Peter Pans,” my mom concluded.
The problem, I’d inform them, is that I too didn’t want to stop living the way I was either. I prefer a (extended stay) nomadic lifestyle. I enjoy living in new countries and American cities, working from furnished rental balconies and cafes. I love languages, I thrive in tropics, and I like that I end up saving money in many of the countries I go to simply by not living in the inflation era of the US (and don’t even get me started on healthcare).
I firmly did not believe their rhetoric that simply because a man does exactly what I do - moves around while working remote and is essentially rootless - that I couldn’t find one to share what we both feel is a rich life, have financial stability, and procreate.
Enters my ex — with his three passports, multiple languages, and towering handsomeness — when he mentioned his stable remote job and deep desire to have kids I thought to myself: “See, I’ve found him.”
A giant wave of relief that I could finally point and say “No, it is possible to find a man in a nontraditional way. Look. I’ve done it. He’s here.”
Nevermind that he’s 7 years younger! That only adds to the tale! My prince charming! My {young} man of the world!
Oh, how the cookie crumbles. And oh how thou doth love to only see what’s staring right at us only in hindsight.
In no reality now is there an angle that gaslights anyone close to me into believing that it was the right move for me to have ever risked moving from one foreign country to another I’d never stepped foot in - Montreal, Canada.
As we currently argue via email over debts he owes, this chapter in my life has now been fully cemented by my family and friends as a catastrophic misstep, a critical time suck.
Mostly, it’s a perfect example for them to point to and conclude: “Settle down. Stop moving around all the time, pick a place, and give up living the way you do.”
I’m horrified in retrospect that I left myself an open target for such skepticism and side eye. In soul sucking defeat, I must wave a white flag.
And I grapple with the unceasing dread that maybe the only way I’ll ever be able to have a kid with someone is to actually force myself to plant roots back in one state and mount a ‘Live Laugh Love’ poster over a plastered white-walled apartment on the 3rd floor of an overly-priced apartment complex with a run down gym.
Arguably, it’s a much more peaceful and stable life when you’re returning to the same bed every night, perhaps even more fulfilling in regards to regular community in place of what I have, which pretty much consists of a lot of WhatsApp messages and DMs from friends around the world.
I’m certainly not one to argue that a novelty-seeking lifestyle is the most fruitful one to bare in this life. I understand exactly what fueled Anthony Bourdain to travel 300 days out of a year, and also why those exact choices likely played a role in his tragic end.
But for those of us struck with the novelty-seeking disease, we often thrive in chaos and I imagine struggle when society deems “it should end.” In turn, this is the first time I now do not feel confident about what to do next in order to have the future I dream. And while I’m enraged at him, I’m mostly enraged at me for making such a drastic error of judgment that has knocked me off my confidence rocker.
When I socked off to Montreal in 2023 on a 10PM flight out of JFK to be with my ex, the cat carrier slung over my shoulder, I took the risk under the grandiose illusion of love and the exciting novelty of what I believed our future could be together.
Does that sound opportunistic? Maybe so. However I have long felt that - generally speaking - people pick one another on the metaphorical path to the end not only for love alone, but for the values, opportunities, or novelty they foresee with this person attached to their name.
Never had I felt more ready for long-term partnership than when I met my ex, and never had I been more intrigued by what I thought we’d be together.
In turn, I idealized him for the loyalty in which he loved his family as much as I also idealized that a future together held the novelty of four passports and three languages for our symbolic children to share.
In essence, I felt I’d struck novelty gold on behalf of my metaphorical kids by being an American who found them a Colombian-European father who had immigrated to Canada with his parents. Together, I felt we’d have so much to offer as a family unit: a dynamic duo. We’d have a brimming trifecta of varying traditions, ethnicities, cultures, and opportunity to give to them. The lotto ticket of a wide life - a stacked deck of cards for them to draw from whether they ultimately chose Colombia, Canary Islands, Calgary, or Columbus, Ohio.
I dreamed of summers on Spanish isles, the kids running on black pebbled beaches in their diapers and lifesavers, hollering in French slang they picked up from their father. I wanted years in Medellin, growing up in the sun and within the frenzy of vibrant shouting car horns and Spanish send offs. And others in the calmness of Canada’s safety or the States expansiveness, where we’d cart them on holidays in my van to campgrounds and national parks. I hoped for Spanish in the home and French with the grandparents. English with my family and Shakira shake offs before bed: an assault of color and light and language and taste.
I wanted as much possibility for my kids as I could offer. Of course, I’d be bereft to not also admit I wanted it for me too.
It’s just my ex, ultimately, did not.
And outside of my burning resentment towards how long it took to figure out that he’d prefer chilling on a Montreal apartment couch for all of time, how can I fault him for ultimately not desiring what I want? Only certain people want to also live in the frenetic way that I crave and I’d argue that in this instance - out of the two of our preferred different lifestyles - it’s me who most would point to and swiftly say “red flag.”
I’m aware that my lifestyle is too much for many suitors. And if I need to be harshly reminded, I can just go to dinner with nearly any of my aged 35+ friends with kids and watch them try to contain their judgment when I speak to what I’d ideally choose for my life if I could have everything my way, on my (rapidly shrinking) timeline.
“Don’t you think you need to settle down somewhere where you’re from and set up a home so you can give yourself the best opportunity to find a partner who’s stable and ready to be a parent?” The question I receive endlessly as of late.
The implication when asking is always, in fact, yes. That if I want kids, I should grow the fuck up, fall in line, and pick an American neighborhood closest to the best public school in the area, and find a partner who gets a hybrid schedule at work so we can switch off picking them up.
It’s sound. It’s logical. It’s objectively reason.
And no sooner has the question escaped their lips, I want to crawl into a hole and die.
“But I almost had this other life,” I want to scream from the rooftops. “I was this close,” I’d say. “Then it filtered through my fingers like sand.”
((Side note: I know what you’re thinking — I never actually had this life. It was all just fan fiction, but god damn it was vision okay.))
“You do whatever you think is best - it’s your life,” my (married and secure) brother said recently when I spoke about spending winter next year in Colombia again. “No one can force you to do anything. But I think from our point of view, we don’t get how if you say you want kids - what you’re doing to lay that groundwork for a home.”
And, as he and everyone else love to point out:
“You’re 35.”
Tick tock, tick tock.
As of late, the emotions keeping me wallowing into the wee hours are really simply unanswered questions about how to proceed at this fork cross in life and the grief of what could be — but wasn’t.
Will I create a future as fulfilling as the one I’d hoped would pan out? Have I crucified myself to a nomadic philosophy that is highly whimsical and unpractical?
How will I return to being satisfied with what is my life instead of what might’ve been? Or open to dreaming with another on what could be and what might? How we’ll get there, and how we’ll fight.
Is it all ‘live, laugh, love’ wall art from here in order for me to have kids? The slow descent into suburban invisibility which seems inevitable for many women come a certain point.
How did I let myself get into this critical zone? A ping ponging of this type of life vs that?
How did I let hope eclipse reason? Idealism buck self-protection?
Mostly, how do I forgive him so I stop bloody whinging?
I suppose, one day, when I pull my head out from under my ass and forgive me.
P.S. if you want to read more similar to this check out my latest posts on the subject:
I filled a few books with that kind of pain once.
It makes better stories than the rings ever did.
Keep writing .
Good god, I loved this. I part winced at the searing honesty & right up to the last line, yearned for the 2005 movie happy ending.
But, maybe the best is yet to come.
Lindsey, bravo sister. Bravo.