I met my husband in a park in New Jersey when I was 14. Twenty years later, we broke up in a park in Brooklyn. He had moved out of the house we owned in Los Angeles three months earlier, in September, under the guise of a trial separation. But when he packed up his car to drive to our hometown in New Jersey, he took a vase his aunt had given him.
“Why do you need a vase for a few months’ separation?” I asked.
“I just need it,” he said, tears in his eyes.
After three months of silence, I flew east to try to talk to him. He refused, and in early December, I received an email that he had filed for divorce. At the time, I was standing in a lingerie store in New Jersey, holding a pair of lacy blue panties and wondering if he would ever see me in them. My panic attack was so severe that mall security had to help me find my car.
A few weeks later, while I was still on the East Coast, a friend tipped me off that my husband was in a bar in Greenpoint. I found him by the pool table and demanded he say to my face that he wanted a divorce. It took him minutes to get the words out. Afterward, we sat shivering on a bench in McGolrick Park and officially ended things. Two decades wrapped up in two hours.
One of the last things he said to me was, “If you write about this, please be kind.”
“I’ll be honest,” I said.
I haunted the holidays with grief so radioactive my family walked around me in 10-foot arcs. But around New Year’s, I gave myself permission to start dating. I had never been on a proper first date in my entire life. As a teenager, dating looked less like dinner and more like meeting up in random public spaces to hold hands under picnic tables while friends lit objects on fire with stolen lighters.
At 36, I made my first dating profile. Under “Dating intentions” I wrote “Just looking for someone to smooch!” and checked the box for “Short-term relationship.”
As I swiped through Marks and Matts and Mikes, the profiles started to blend into one big dude soup. Everyone seemed so unfamiliar. Until I came across a man who listed his hometown as Bergen County.
“Me too,” I messaged him. We planned to meet for drinks in Bushwick, a short journey from the room I had rented in Crown Heights.
It shocked me how calm I felt on the walk over. My husband leaving me was my worst nightmare, and I survived it. There was nothing left to fear.
Steph looked handsome with his stubbly jaw and nose ring. We connected over a now-shuttered coffee shop we used to patronize as kids called — dorkily — Cool Beans Cafe. We talked about our favorite bands, Pavement (his) and Dinosaur Jr. (mine). Then I told him I was on my first date in 20 years. He flagged the bartender for another shot.
“That’s — a lot,” he said.
Once he recovered, I asked if he wanted to take a photo in the photo booth to commemorate the occasion. He obliged, and we squeezed onto the wooden stool while the flash blinded us.
For years, I wondered how two strangers knew it was time to kiss; with my husband, I only had to look at him, and he understood. On the next flash, I looked at Steph. He turned toward me, leaned in, and we kissed. Another flash. The second man I had ever kissed, immortalized on a photo strip.
That was the first of 11 first kisses I had that month.
Throughout our marriage, my husband often said he felt like he was a bicycle and I was a Corvette. He said he couldn’t keep up with me — I am too ambitious, too goal-oriented. He wanted a slower life. I told him I always appreciated that we moved at different paces. After all, a person can get hurt going too fast. Once he left, I had no idea what else to do but to floor it.
I kissed Bryan, a gardener, on his red leather couch. I kissed Ray, a painter, in his lofted bed and smashed my head into his ceiling fan. Andrew 1 kissed me at the Met in front of a painting of hell. “Sometimes I think this is hell,” he said, gesturing around us before putting his mouth on mine.
Andrew 2 seemed confident over text but wary in person. He surprised me with a smooch on a street corner while we waited for the light to change.
At this point, it was still early January. I took myself back to my parents’ house in New Jersey to regroup. At the breakfast table, my parents — married for over 40 years — regarded me like an escaped zoo animal. They asked questions about the impending divorce, and I blinked like I was waking up from tranquilizers.
“I don’t know what’s going on with that,” I said, flipping open Hinge like it was a pack of cigarettes.
Haden, a sommelier, met me to walk a friend’s dog. We kissed kneeling on the welcome mat while our hands fumbled to free the pug from her harness. Thomas, a surfer, walked me to the subway after playing pool at a dive bar. He planted one on me outside the C train.
I had no reason to guard myself or play games on these dates. When men asked why I was single, I told them it was because my partner of 20 years walked out on me with as much warning as one might get before an earthquake. I told them how, for three months, I cried on the floor, in my bed, in my car, at bars, in friends’ backyards and at the Oasis concert. I told them how I screamed into dish towels and lost 12 pounds from the sheer terror of it all. I told them I made my 70-year-old parents fly across a continent to sit on either side of me and hold my hands while I wept.
In return, the men were unexpectedly kind. I had heard so many horror stories about the emotional capacity of the male species, but these guys told me I didn’t deserve to be treated that way. They shared with me their most treacherous heartbreaks, sent me their breakup albums, warned me which movies to avoid. They gave me advice on how to put myself back together again. They promised me I would be OK. They apologized on his behalf. They gave me closure that my husband couldn’t. They said what he didn’t.
Martin, in sales, kissed me over cocktails. Wooj, in tech, told me I was in the top 3 percent of women he had ever kissed in terms of personality, but the top 10 percent in looks. Liam, a skateboarder, kissed me on my roommate’s couch. Afterward, he said, “I think you just need a big hug, girl,” and held me until my breathing slowed.
And with two days left in January, a writer named Luke kissed me in a dark booth at a Bed-Stuy bar after making me laugh so hard that I thought to myself, “Uh oh.”
January ended. A month later, I had mostly recovered from my kiss bender. But then I kissed a French expat in a hammock on a balcony overlooking the ocean in Costa Rica, where I spent the month of March surfing, writing and learning to slow down. He’s the only man I have kissed since I left New York.
I realized after our night together that I had never once mentioned my husband or the divorce. We talked instead about the waves, the heat and how to say “so good” in French (“si bon”) and Spanish (“tan bueno”) while he traced circles on the inside of my wrist. He knows me only as a tourist who will leave this place once the swell does. I guess I’m no longer defining myself by my marriage. I am, as the kissers promised, OK.
The thing is, when I spent the fall sobbing on all fours, spit pooling onto the rug, it wasn’t because I thought I would never be OK. I was crying because I knew that I would one day be OK — without him. And the “without him” part destroyed me.
We were best friends. We were kids together. I thought that we would be in each other’s lives forever, that he would always be there to hold my hand under the picnic table. But he fully let go. And that’s a pain no amount of kisses can make better. It will hurt for 20 more years, and 20 after that.
So here’s the kindest thing I can say: My husband was the best kisser of them all.
Erin Chack, who lives in Los Angeles, is the author of “This Is Really Happening,” a collection of personal essays.
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