The Four C’s

I am dating again. There. I said it.

After the end of a year-long relationship, I have once again been released into the wild, where apparently I am expected to swipe on strangers, make small talk about what I do for fun, and determine whether a man is emotionally stable based on six photos and his answer to a prompt about his ideal Sunday. Fantastic.

Somewhere between downloading the apps, deleting the apps, downloading them again, and contemplating whether dying alone with several very attractive dogs might actually be the superior option, I started asking myself a question: What do I actually want? You would think at forty-seven I would know. I do not. Or maybe I do. It's just that the answer has changed.

When I was younger, I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted a husband. I wanted children. I wanted a house with enough bedrooms and enough love. I wanted family vacations and Christmas mornings and someone sitting next to me at soccer games. I wanted a partner who made me laugh when life got hard and held my hand when it got harder. Basically, I wanted the brochure: marriage, kids, house, forever.

Society handed me the checklist and I happily started checking boxes. Find love. Check. Get married. Check. Have babies. Check. Grow old together. Well. We all know how that one went.

Turns out nobody tells you what to do when the roadmap catches fire. There isn't a chapter in the fairy tale called And Then They Got Divorced, Split Custody 50/50 and Downloaded Bumble. There really should be.

Divorce has this strange way of giving you a second starting line. At first, it doesn't feel like one. It feels like a finish line you crawled across bleeding. It feels like a funeral for a future you were absolutely certain belonged to you. But eventually—after the crying and the anger and the therapy and the wine and the terrible dates and the rebuilding and the approximately 4,000 times you say, "I am never dating again"—something shifts.

You realize you aren't at the end. You're at the beginning. Again. Except this time, you're not the same person standing at the starting line. When you're twenty-five, you're choosing a future. When you're forty-seven, you're choosing a life. And those are two very different things.

I am no longer looking for the father of my future children. I already did that. Twice. The children, I mean. Not the fathers. One father. Let's not make this story more complicated than it already is.

My girls are growing up. We have our routines, our traditions, our inside jokes. We have survived years of being our own weird little unit. I don't need Father 2.0. Nobody ordered that software update. My daughters don't need another dad, and I don't need someone to come rescue me.

Which is both incredibly freeing and, as it turns out, incredibly inconvenient. Because when you remove need from the equation, you're left with something much harder: want.

I don't need someone to provide for me. I don't need someone to give me children. I don't need someone to build my life. I built it. Not exactly the way I imagined it and certainly not without some structural damage, but it's mine.

I have a career. I have a home. I have children. I can make money. I can solve problems. I can negotiate contracts, kill spiders, and assemble furniture while swearing at an Allen wrench. I have survived divorce. I have survived heartbreak. I have survived dating in Los Angeles. Frankly, the last one deserves its own medal.

The woman writing this is infinitely more capable than the girl who walked down the aisle all those years ago. So if I don't need a man, what would make me choose one? After an unreasonable amount of field research, I think I've narrowed it down to four things. The Four C's.

Chemistry

I want chemistry. I know. Very evolved of me. But I do. And this one isn't negotiable anymore, because I've already made the mistake of believing chemistry could grow where it didn't exist.

When I met my ex-husband, he was good on paper. Really good on paper. He came from a well-to-do family, had a great job, took me to amazing restaurants, and eventually introduced me to his mother—who, for an embarrassingly long moment, I thought was the housekeeper because she was standing at the sink doing dishes.

In my defense, I wasn't accustomed to that kind of life. Or random women who didn't live there casually doing things in the kitchen.

Eventually, he became my best friend. We laughed constantly. We had fun. We traveled. We built a life together. He adored me, and for a very long time, I believed that was enough. Because he loved me so much.

He was devoted to me. He made me feel safe. He wanted a future with me. And somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that friendship plus devotion plus unconditional love equaled romantic love. There was just one tiny problem.

I never looked at him and thought, Oh my God, I want to fuck that guy. Not once.

Believe me, I tried. I'd look at him with my head slightly tilted and one eye squinted, like maybe if I changed the angle enough I could find the attraction. Nope. Other eye? Still no.

And when you're young, especially when you're trying to choose someone to build a life with, it's surprisingly easy to convince yourself that chemistry is the superficial part. The immature part. The thing you're supposed to grow out of. He's kind. He's successful. He's my best friend. He loves me. What more could I possibly want? Turns out, quite a bit.

Because love can grow. Friendship can grow. Trust can grow. Intimacy can deepen. But I don't believe chemistry works that way. Chemistry is like talent. You either have it or you don't. And no amount of staring at someone with one eye closed is going to manufacture it.

The strangest proof of that came at the end of my marriage. When I discovered my husband was cheating on me with his assistant, I was furious. Furious about the lying. Furious about the gaslighting. Furious that someone I trusted could look me directly in the face and make me question what I knew was happening.

But the actual cheating? That part, strangely, I understood. And admitting that feels terrible, but it's true.

Because somewhere underneath all of my anger was the knowledge that I was never going to look at him like a tiger ready to devour its prey. I was always going to be the woman closing one eye, tilting her head and trying to convince herself that what she felt was enough. And eventually, that's unfair to both people.

I had spent years telling myself that sex wasn't everything. And it isn't. But attraction isn't nothing either. I don't want to have to talk myself into wanting the person I love. I don't want to need a bottle of wine and strategic lighting to convince my body to participate in something my brain has already decided should be happening. And I don't ever want a man I love to live that way either.

Because every person deserves to know what it feels like to be wanted by the person who chose them. Not appreciated. Not tolerated. Not "you're such a good person." Wanted.

I want the man I'm with to catch me looking at him from across the room and know exactly what I'm thinking. I want him to feel desired. And I want that in return.

I want butterflies. I want the glance that lasts half a second too long. I want accidental touches that don't feel accidental. I want to kiss someone and temporarily forget that I have emails to answer, children to pick up, and approximately seventeen things on my to-do list.

I want the kind of dinner where you suddenly realize three hours have passed. The kind of kiss where your brain briefly stops functioning. The kind of connection that makes you feel seventeen and forty-seven at exactly the same time.

And yes, I know chemistry can get you into trouble. Believe me. I've conducted enough field research on that subject to qualify for federal funding.

Chemistry isn't compatibility. It isn't character. It isn't kindness. And it sure as hell isn't proof that someone is emotionally available. You need all the other things too.

But here's what I finally understand: Love cannot create chemistry. And chemistry cannot create love. They are two entirely different things. For most of my life, I thought choosing the safer one made me mature. Now I know I don't want to choose between them. I want both.

I want to love the man standing in front of me. And I want to look at him and think: Oh, I am absolutely going to fuck that guy.

Because this time, I'm keeping both eyes open.

Curiosity

I used to think curiosity was pretty simple. If a man is interested in me, he'll ask me questions. He'll want to know things. Seems like a relatively low bar. Then I started dating. Apparently, it is not.

One of the more fascinating things I've learned in the dating world is just how rare it is for a man to stop talking about himself long enough to contemplate the possibility that there might be another interesting person sitting at the table. I've been on dates where I could have been replaced by a houseplant with tits and I'm not entirely sure he would have noticed.

He'll tell me about his job. His divorce. His workout. His kids. His ex-wife. His golf game. His investment portfolio. His childhood trauma. His thoughts on politics. His fantasy football team. The thing his boss said on Tuesday. And I'll sit there nodding, asking questions, doing what I naturally do when I'm getting to know another human being.

Then forty-five minutes later, I'll realize he hasn't asked me a single fucking thing about myself. Not one. At which point I start wondering if I'm actually on a date or if I've accidentally agreed to host a podcast.

So yes, my first requirement for curiosity is admittedly basic: Are you curious about me? Not just interested in the pretty face sitting across the table. Not just pleased that I'm there because somehow having me on your arm makes you feel like you did something right in life. Do you actually want to know who I am?

What do I think about when I can't sleep? What makes me excited? What scares me? Why did I make the choices I made? What am I trying to build? What do I regret? What do I believe? What makes me laugh? What makes me cry? What makes me feel alive? I want someone who doesn't just look at me. I want someone who wants to discover me.

But here's where it gets complicated. Because I used to think curiosity was a yes-or-no question. Curious? Check. Not curious? Next. Then my last relationship taught me something I hadn't considered before. Curiosity has depth.

He was curious about me. Incredibly curious, actually. We could talk endlessly about anything and everything. He wanted to know my thoughts, my feelings, my history, why I reacted to something the way I did. There were nights we talked for hours, peeling back layers of each other until we were both exhausted. And I loved that.

But over time, I started noticing something I had never encountered before. There seemed to be a boundary around his curiosity. A capacity restriction. It was almost as if his environment and upbringing had drawn an invisible circle around the world, and inside that circle he was endlessly curious. Outside of it, something short-circuited.

He understood the world he knew. His blue-collar job. Trips to the woods. Off-roading in his Jeep. The places he'd been. The things he'd experienced. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those things. The problem was that he didn't seem particularly interested in what existed beyond them.

I wanted to wander the streets of Barcelona. I wanted to stand somewhere in Machu Picchu completely overwhelmed by the fact that human beings built it hundreds of years ago. I wanted to eat food I couldn't pronounce and hear languages I didn't understand. I wanted to walk into museums and learn about people who lived thousands of years before me. I wanted to get on a plane and see a part of the world that might change the way I looked at my own.

His idea of getting away was a Holiday Inn Express in Palm Springs. Again, nothing wrong with Palm Springs. I love Palm Springs. But there are a lot of Holiday Inn Expresses between here and the grave, and I don't want to spend the rest of my life visiting all of them.

What I realized was that I don't just need someone who is curious about me. I need someone who is curious about life. And more importantly, I need someone whose curiosity can expand. Someone willing to walk outside the boundaries of what he already knows and say, Show me.

I don't need us to love all the same things. Actually, I don't want that. I want him to have a world that is his, and I want to have a world that is mine. But I want us to be curious enough to enter each other's worlds.

Take me off-roading. I'll probably complain about the dust and ask repeatedly if we're going to die, but I'll go. And then come wander Barcelona with me. Not because Barcelona was secretly on your bucket list. Come because I can't wait to see it, and you're curious enough about the world—and about me—to want to understand why.

That's the difference. Curiosity isn't having the same interests. It's being interested in things you haven't experienced yet. It's asking another question instead of assuming you already know the answer. It's being willing to change your mind. It's admitting there are things you don't know. It's encountering something unfamiliar and moving toward it instead of retreating back into what feels comfortable.

Because at forty-seven, I don't want my world to get smaller. I want it to get bigger. I want to meet people I haven't met, see places I haven't seen, learn things I don't know, change opinions I thought were permanent, and discover versions of myself I haven't met yet. And I want someone beside me who still has that same hunger.

Someone who hasn't decided that who he is today is the finished product. Someone who can still be surprised. Someone who can still be changed. Someone who looks at the enormous amount of life we haven't experienced yet and thinks, What else is out there?

Finding a man who's curious about me is hard enough. Finding one whose curiosity is big enough to grow alongside mine? That's the fucking needle in the haystack.

Care

This one took me longer to understand because care sounds boring. Chemistry gets songs written about it. Adventure gets Instagram reels. Care gets, "What time is your flight? Text me when you land." But the older I get, the more I think that might be one of the sexiest sentences in the English language.

I talk to a lot of married people, and you know what I've discovered? A lot of them are fucking miserable. They complain about the way their spouse chews. That he doesn't help enough around the house. That she spends too much money. That he never listens. That she never wants to have sex. That he leaves his socks on the floor. You've heard all of these complaints before, and I won't waste your time reliving twenty years of marital resentment here. But whenever I listen to these conversations, I find myself thinking the same thing. You know what's missing? Care.

Now, before anyone who has been happily married for twenty-five years starts taking relationship advice from me, please don't. I am absolutely not the authority on "How to Stay Married for Twenty Years and Still Like Each Other." Lord knows I failed that test early. I barely made it eight years and somehow became the poster child for What Not to Do When Choosing a Husband, so please consider the source.

But I do know something about living without care. When you've been single for a long time, you start to realize how much of a relationship isn't romance at all. It's simply having another human being in the world who cares about what happens to you. And I think I learned that in the most brutal way possible.

Five days after I found out about my husband's affair, my mom died. Five days.

In less than a week, two of the people I thought would always be there were suddenly gone in completely different ways. One died. One betrayed me. And I don't think I understood until then just how much security exists in simply knowing someone cares about you. You don't really notice it when you have it. Then it all disappears at once.

I was going through the worst week of my life, followed by some of the hardest years of my life. I was grieving my mother while simultaneously grieving my marriage, trying to raise two little girls, figuring out how to support myself, and rebuilding a life I never expected to have to rebuild.

And there were so many moments when I didn't need romance. I didn't need flowers. I didn't need someone sweeping me off my feet. I just wanted someone to annoyingly call me every single day and ask, "Are you okay?"

I wanted an emergency contact. Not the person you put down on a medical form because the receptionist won't let you leave the line blank. A real one. The person you absolutely know will answer the phone. The person you don't have to wonder whether you're bothering.

The person who will get in the car, get on the plane, show up at the hospital, pick up your kids, bring you food, sit next to you, or just stay on the phone while you fall apart.

For a long time, the closest person I had was my sister. And she lived two thousand miles away. So hopefully whatever emergency I was having occurred near an airport with a direct flight, because that was pretty much the best plan I had.

I think that's why the small acts of care mean so much to me now. Care is remembering how I take my coffee. It's knowing I hate driving somewhere unfamiliar and automatically grabbing the keys. It's asking how the meeting went because three days ago I mentioned I was nervous about it. It's filling my gas tank because you happened to notice it was empty.

It's the "Did you get home?" text. It's remembering the doctor's appointment. It's noticing I'm overwhelmed before I have to announce that I'm overwhelmed. It's sending the text. Making the call. Showing up. Not once. Consistently.

I've had grand gestures. They're lovely. But grand gestures are easy when someone is trying to win you. I'm much more interested in what happens after they think they already have you.

Because I think care might be one of the first things we give each other in relationships and one of the first things we stop giving when we get too comfortable. Maybe that's what I'm hearing when my married friends complain about each other. Maybe somewhere between the mortgage and the kids and the laundry and the work schedules and deciding whose turn it is to unload the dishwasher, they stopped caring for each other. Or maybe they didn't stop caring at all. Maybe they just stopped noticing that the other person still does.

I don't know. Again, I have never been given the opportunity to test this theory over a twenty-year marriage. So consider my theory on long-term relationships a little like peptides: seems promising, lots of people swear by it, but we're still under investigation.

What I do know is what happens when care is gone. And once you've been starved of something for long enough, you recognize it immediately when someone finally gives it to you.

I notice care. I notice when someone remembers. I notice when someone checks in. I notice when someone does something that makes my life easier without being asked. I notice when someone considers me in a decision even though he didn't have to. I notice when someone shows up.

And maybe people who have had that consistently for twenty years stop seeing it. Maybe something that once felt like love eventually starts feeling like expectation. I hope I never let that happen.

Because I don't need someone to take care of me. I've spent enough years proving I can take care of myself. I want someone who cares for me. And I want to care for him right back. Not because either of us is incapable of surviving without the other, but because neither of us should have to do everything alone anymore.

Maybe that's the distinction I couldn't understand when I was younger. I used to think love was being needed. Now I think love might be having two perfectly capable people who don't need each other at all, but still wake up every day and think, How can I make your life a little easier today?

That's care. And for me, it's non-negotiable. Care about my day. Care about my dreams. Care when I'm scared. Care when I'm annoying. Care when I'm sick. Care when I'm thriving. Care enough to tell me when I'm wrong. Care enough to notice when I'm not myself. Care enough to pick up the fucking phone.

Care for me. Apparently, it was literally in my name the entire time. CARE-rie.

Okay, that was terrible. But I'm keeping it.

Compassion

And then there is the fourth C. Compassion. Maybe this is the one I didn't understand at all when I was younger, because back then I thought the goal was finding the right person. The perfect person. The person who would somehow make having a successful relationship easy. Now I think that's complete bullshit.

Compassion isn't about having the perfect relationship with the perfect person. Compassion starts with the realization that we're human. Which means we're imperfect.

Actually, the entire concept of "perfect" seems a little suspicious to me. We throw the word around constantly, but where is the evidence that this thing even exists? I've never met a perfect person. I've never seen a perfect house. I've never met a perfect child. I've never eaten a perfect meal. I've never had a perfect vacation. Even the things that look perfect from the outside usually have a clogged toilet, a screaming kid, an argument, food poisoning, or somebody crying in a bathroom somewhere.

Nothing in life is perfect. So why the hell do we expect our relationships to be? More importantly, why do we expect the person we love to be?

To me, compassion within a relationship is giving another human being permission to fuck up. To make the wrong decision. To say the wrong thing. To have a terrible day and take it out on the wrong person. To shut down when they should speak. To speak when they should probably shut the fuck up. To occasionally be a complete asshole.

Not abusive. Not cruel. Not repeatedly destructive. Compassion isn't an unlimited hall pass for shitty behavior. But human? Yes. I want there to be room for human. Because I'm going to need that room too.

I am independent to a fault. I overthink things. I have triggers I didn't ask for and walls I definitely did not build for decorative purposes. Sometimes I get scared and it looks like anger. Sometimes I need reassurance and have absolutely no idea how to ask for it. Sometimes the woman who can handle everything suddenly doesn't want to handle one more fucking thing.

There will be days when I am not the best version of myself. I am going to fuck up. I am going to say something I regret. I am going to misunderstand something. I am going to make decisions based on fear instead of logic. I am probably going to be a total asshole at some point. And so will he.

Compassion is what happens next.

It's being angry with someone and still being curious enough to wonder, What is actually going on with you? It's caring enough to have the conversation when you'd rather retreat to separate corners and build legal cases against each other in your heads.

Sometimes it's also caring enough not to have the conversation yet. To recognize that the person standing in front of you doesn't have the capacity to resolve this right now, even though every cell in your body wants to talk about it until 3:00 a.m.

It's giving someone space when you'd rather have reassurance. It's giving reassurance when you'd rather have space. It's understanding that loving another person occasionally requires meeting them where they are instead of demanding that they immediately come to where you are.

And sometimes compassion is simply forgiveness. Not because what happened was okay. Not because you agree with the decision. Not because your feelings magically disappeared. But because you understand enough about the person you love to see how they got there.

There is a difference between understanding someone's behavior and excusing it. I think I spent a lot of my life confusing the two. Understanding says, I can see why you did that. Excusing says, You can keep doing it. Those are not the same thing.

Compassion doesn't mean abandoning your boundaries. If anything, I think real compassion requires them. I can understand why someone behaves a certain way and still say, "You cannot treat me that way." I can forgive someone and still expect change. I can love someone and still hold them accountable. And hopefully, someone can do the same for me.

Because compassion also means saying you're sorry when you're wrong. Actually sorry. Not, "I'm sorry you feel that way." That sentence should probably be punishable by law.

I'm talking about the kind of apology where you swallow your pride and say, "I fucked up. I hurt you. I understand why you're upset. I'm sorry." And then the other person has to do something equally difficult. Accept it. Even when they're still a little salty. Maybe especially when they're still a little salty. Because eventually someone has to decide that being connected matters more than winning.

That's compassion. It's moving forward because you understand why someone did what they did, even if you don't agree with it. It's remembering who someone is at their best while they're standing in front of you at their worst.

I think that's one of the hardest parts of loving someone. When we're hurt, we have a tendency to rewrite the entire person around the thing they just did. Suddenly they're selfish. They're an asshole. They've never cared. Everything was a lie.

But sometimes a good person just does a shitty thing. Sometimes a loving person says something unloving. Sometimes a strong person falls apart. Sometimes a thoughtful person is selfish. Sometimes the person you love is simply going to disappoint you.

And compassion is being able to hold two truths at the same time: What you did hurt me. And... I still know who you are.

Maybe that's why compassion has to be the last C. Because I don't think it can exist without the others. You need curiosity to want to understand what's happening beneath someone's behavior. You need care to give a shit enough to work through it. And somewhere underneath all of it, you probably still need enough chemistry to remember why you wanted to rip each other's clothes off before you started arguing about who forgot to make the dinner reservation.

Compassion may be the glue that holds the other three together. And maybe, in the end, it's the thing that holds the relationship together too.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've learned a lot in the last ten years of dating. Do I know how to choose the right man? Evidence remains inconclusive. Do I know how to maintain a successful relationship for twenty years? Absolutely fucking not.

At this point, staying in a relationship longer than a school year feels like an advanced placement course I haven't qualified for yet. But I do know what feels good. I know what feels bad. I know what attraction feels like. I know what it's like to sit across from someone who wants to discover every part of you. I know what it feels like when someone notices you. And, maybe more importantly, I know what emotional starvation feels like.

So maybe I don't have all the answers. Maybe I don't even have a smidge of the answers. But I finally know what I'm unwilling to live without. Chemistry. Curiosity. Care. Compassion.

And maybe the most important compassion I've learned is the compassion I've finally started giving myself. For choosing the wrong people. For staying too long. For leaving. For ignoring things I knew. For not knowing things I couldn't possibly have known. For wanting love even after love has made me look like a complete fucking idiot more times than I'd care to admit.

I care about myself enough now to keep looking. And I have enough compassion for myself to know that wanting love isn't a weakness, even when I haven't always been particularly good at finding it.

So I'm going to keep trying. I'm going to keep believing that somewhere out there is the right combination of chemistry, curiosity, care, and compassion. The perfect chemical bond. Which, theoretically, should create some magical fifth C.

Connection? Compatibility? Commitment? Climax? Actually, let's not rule that one out.

I don't know what the fifth C is yet. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the four are enough. Or maybe that's the whole point.

After spending half my life searching for perfect, I've finally realized I don't want a perfect man. I want an imperfect one who is perfect for me.

Fuck. I guess I still believe in perfect after all.