Lunchtime update.

After nine months on his brother’s couch, he realized he’s made the mistake of his life. He’s begging his wife to take him back. She is “making him squirm”, but probably will.

In the last round of comments, the split was between people who thought he was leaving an unhappy marriage and the intern was a symptom, and people who thought he’d thrown away a good marriage for a fantasy of him and the intern. I thought that either way, with the intern out of the picture, he was in for a stretch of being single. I thought he had no idea what that would be like when he chose to leave his wife.

The last time this guy had been single was when he was nineteen. I have a theory that your dating age stops when you get into long-term relationships. So this guy’s dating age was about college. He probably thought there were smart beautiful women everywhere, and you hung out with them in dorm rooms, in hopeful agony until you are suddenly shocked and delighted to be making out. He probably thought that when you weren’t yearning for exciting co-eds, you were hanging out with your buds, doing goofy things. He probably thought that was what he was missing by being with his wife. Last he was single, that was the alternative to her.

Men who are considering leaving your marriages in your thirties, that is not what being single is like now. You may like being single. It may be far better than a painfully broken marriage. But I have seen a number of you, paired since you were young, and I want to warn you that it could be very rough. I do not think you have the skills to be single.

Being single requires work, work you likely never had to do before. You may not have had to do this work because when you were last single, fun people were everywhere. You may not have had to do this work because you and your wife were sufficient unto yourselves, content in each other’s company. You may not have had to do this work because your wife did it; socializing often falls to the woman in a couple. But if you want a full and pleasant single life, work is coming your way and you do not know how to do it.

When you are single, it is up to you to develop your social networks. You must tend the friends you already have, calling them to propose things to do, sending notes when they are in need (and being alert to that need in the first place), meeting them when you want to and also when they want to but maybe you don’t. You must help them in big and little ways and accept help. If you want them to keep calling, you must show up for things and be a good guest. It is up to you now to call to see if there is anything you can bring to dinner. Your wife probably did most of that before, but now you must learn.

Worse, you will need to make new friends. Longtime friends move, get busy, fall out of rotation. If you want your single life to be full of people, you must develop new friends now, so they’ll be close friends later. Yep. You must meet strangers. And talk to them. And suggest getting beers. You must be where people are and make conversation and see them again. Good luck with that, newly single man. It can be very pleasant, but it is work.

The other thing you will have to do to enjoy your single life is to anticipate and manage your own moods. It is possible you like solitude, lots of people do. But if you’ve been with someone your entire adult life, my guess is that you have no idea how to handle it. You will have to learn to enjoy solitude. You also have to anticipate when solitude will become miserable bored loneliness. Will it bum you out to have no one to watch fireworks with on Fourth of July? You must anticipate that in June and solve it in advance. Have people over, hint until you’re invited to something, go camping. You must address this, so you aren’t disgusted with yourself for drinking alone in front of the tv and falling asleep on your couch. Can you feel that you’re getting sad this afternoon and dreading an evening of nothing and porn in an ugly apartment? Can’t think of anyone to call? You must realize this and run a couple extra miles this evening. The endorphins will carry you through. There is no one else to solve it. You must manage yourself. You may well know how to manage the combination of you and your (ex?) wife, but you will have to learn to manage just you.

Men who may be leaving your wives, you will have to do this new work. It will be hard. I’m going to leave out dating, which is sometimes energizing and fascinating, and sometimes just makes for good stories, and is often drudgery and rejection. But developing friendships and managing yourself are the keys to the pleasant single life you envision. The alternative is numbing yourself in front of a screen with some additional depressant. You should take this new work into account when you make your decision about your marriage.