Will I ever find love again?

The again is the whole question, and I noticed it, because people who have not had it yet do not type the again. You have had it, for a long time by the sound of things, and it ended in a lawyer’s office or a hospital corridor or a kitchen with the boxes half packed, and now you are asking whether the thing itself has gone rather than the person. That is a different fear from being lonely, and will I ever find love again is a different question from will I find love. It is the fear that you are finished.

I cannot promise you a person, and nobody honest can, and I would rather say that in the second paragraph than let you hope that a card at the bottom of the page will name a season. Will I ever find love again is not a question the cards can see the end of. What they can see, and what I can talk about, is the month you are actually in, and what is in your hands inside it, which is more than it feels like at the moment.

What the again is carrying

The second time is different from the first in one way that matters more than age or circumstance: you know the price. You walk in with no idea what it costs to build a life with someone and then to have it taken apart, and this time you would be signing up with the invoice already in your hand. That is not a disadvantage. It is the reason people who love again tend to do it more carefully and better, but it does explain why the wanting comes with a flinch attached.

If yours ended in a death, there is usually something else in the again, which is the feeling that wanting it would be a kind of leaving. I want to say plainly that it is not, and that the person who loved you would be unlikely to have wanted you to spend twenty years being loyal to a chair. If yours ended in a divorce, the again often comes with a vow, never again, made somewhere unlovely, and vows made in anger are not binding. You are allowed to reconsider one.

Will I ever find love again, answered honestly

I do not know, and the odds are not really the point, because you were not asking for a percentage. Underneath the question is a smaller and more answerable one, which is whether it is safe to want it, and whether wanting it and not getting it would be worse than not wanting it at all.

Here is my honest view, and I hold it fairly firmly: not wanting it is not safe either, it is only quiet. The people I have known who decided they were finished did not stop wanting, they stopped admitting it, and the wanting went somewhere less useful: into being very busy, or very tidy, or very good to everybody else’s children. Wanting something you may not get is the ordinary condition of being alive, and you have been doing it in every other area of your life without calling it foolish.

The two kinds of not ready

There is a real not ready and there is a habit that has learned to sound like it, and it helps to know which one you are holding.

The real one is grief still doing its work, and you can tell it because it is specific. You are not ready because Sunday mornings still belong to somebody, because you cannot yet eat in that restaurant, because the idea of another person’s coat on the hook makes you feel sick. That is not a problem to solve. It is a stage, it passes at its own pace, and the only sensible thing is not to rush it.

The habitual one is vaguer. It says not yet without a because, and it has been saying not yet for two years, and if you ask it what would have to change for the answer to be yes it goes quiet. That one is not grief. It is protection that has outlived its job, and the way to test it is small: imagine being asked out for a coffee by somebody kind, and notice whether what you feel is loss or exposure. Loss means wait. Exposure means the door is fine, and you are only out of practice at opening it.

What this month is actually for

It is not for an app, and not for a strategy, and I would be suspicious of anyone who told you the answer was to put yourself out there, because that phrase has never once described a real evening.

The month is for the small returns. Eating at the table rather than over the sink, because a person who eats at a table is a person who could have somebody opposite. Sleeping in the middle of the bed, or on the other side, once, to find out whether you can. Answering honestly when a friend asks how you are, which most widowed and divorced people stop doing because the honest answer takes too long and makes the friend’s face do something. These are not preparation for love. They are the practice of being a person who can be seen, and being seen is the actual skill, and it goes rusty.

The sentence that changes the month

There is one thing I would ask you to do before the month is out, and it is smaller than it sounds and larger than it feels. Tell one person, out loud or by message, that you would like to meet someone eventually. Not that you are ready, not that you want to be set up, just that you would like it, at some point, and that you are saying so.

People who do this describe the same thing afterward. Nothing happens, and something changes. The friend does not produce a suitable widower from a cupboard, but you have stopped being, in one person’s mind and therefore slightly in your own, somebody who is finished, and that shift is the only part of this that is genuinely in your hands. The rest is weather, and I will not read it for you, because it cannot be read.

What is yours this month

Whether you eat at the table, which side of the bed, the honest answer to how are you, and one sentence to one person. That is the whole list, and it fits in a month. If you want cards to sit with it, the will I find love page reads the waiting without inventing a stranger, and the soulmate reading is a fair place to take the question of whether you are hoping for a person or a rescue. If the month feels like a beginning that will not start, the new moon piece is about exactly that argument with yourself.

You were not finished. You were interrupted, and the two are easy to confuse from the inside. Come back and tell me who you said it to, and what their face did.

Clara