But even if by nothing else than association, I am a divorced woman and therefore damaged goods.” “I didn’t ask for divorce, it wasn’t my idea. “I’m considered damaged goods,” I said to myself, pressing my face into the pillow, squeezing back my tears. The word damaged kept cycling through my head, and in those hours when objectivity is sound asleep, I felt the destructiveness of that word seeping down into my soul. Lying awake and looking at the red numbers of my clock slowly changing to mark the quiet moving of time through the night, the four o’clock becoming five, I kept hearing snippets of those two conversations.
I don’t know why they’re on here because they don’t seem like they really want to form a new relationship.” “Well, you know, Connie,” she said, “a lot of the guys on these sites seem to be emotionally damaged. In my conversation with my online dating mentor, I complained that many of the men I’d ‘Liked’ or messaged on the dating sites either didn’t respond or were slow to respond. The day before my fitful night of sleep, a conversation with a friend who was mentoring me in online dating, had reminded me of the conversation years before about the couple getting married. But still, to hear her pronouncement gave me pause and stuck in my memory over many years. I don’t think most people I knew would have responded that way it seemed to have more to do with that woman’s narrow view than a commonly held belief. She elaborated on her view that the woman was very lucky that he was marrying her– since he was a “good catch” and hadn’t been married before. “Well,” she said, “he’ll be getting damaged goods.” The woman’s response surprised me when she learned that while this would be the man’s first marriage, the woman he was marrying had been divorced. I told her what I knew as I would with anyone– providing a picture of the soon-to-be couple. The woman I was speaking with was very curious about the particulars of how they met, details about the fiancee’s age and occupation etc. The subject had been a man whom we knew who was getting married. When I traced back to the seed of that despair, it took me to a conversation with a family member many years prior. It was one of those times when you have a hard time seeing hope– in spite of your best efforts to focus on the positive, to believe that things will get better. I had been discouraged the day before after months of isolation from the pandemic and going through divorce. It was a dark night last winter when I was tossing and turning and woke from my fitful sleep at four in the morning.
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