the second innocence

notes on love, after

Because innocence the first time is just ignorance dressed up. You didn’t know what love cost yet. You hadn’t met your own capacity for self-betrayal, or your own resilience, or the particular loneliness of being in the wrong relationship for the right reasons.

I’ve lived through the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s. I’ve dated, gotten my heart broken, fallen in and out of love. I’ve raised a Gen Z child into adulthood and am now raising a Gen Alpha in an overly connected, digitized world that would be unrecognizable to the girl I used to be. When I tell people I’ve been married since my twenties, they assume I’m inexperienced. Sheltered. Naive about men.

I may love like a fool. But I am not naive about men.

What I didn’t know — what none of us know the first time — is what attachment disguised as love actually costs. Not the romantic cost. The personal one. The slow erosion of self that can happen inside even a chosen life. The particular ache of being next to someone and feeling completely alone. You don’t learn that from dating. You learn it from staying.

A friend recently told me that divorce is like going through second puberty. It hit home immediately. Because it’s one thing to be dating and meeting new people in your thirties, forties, fifties. It’s another thing entirely to do it after you tuck away the wedding ring. After a life built together. After learning that what you believed was happily ever after was not, in fact, forever.

There is a quiet reckoning in that realization. A humbling. You learn that love is completely outside your control — and that if you can control it, it probably isn’t love in its truest sense.