What the Wilderness Was Actually For
Worthiness Culture Series: Unchaperoned Life | Post 3 of 6
There is a story you tell yourself on a long business trip.
It goes like this: I have a good marriage. It's hard right now. The distance is difficult. But I'll be home on Friday and we'll find our way back to each other.
I told myself that story for years. I told it to colleagues on airplanes and to myself in hotel rooms and to my kids on the phone when they asked when I was coming home. It was a reasonable story. It was a survivable story. And it was, I eventually discovered, almost entirely false.
The truth came out gradually and then all at once, the way most truths do. When I stopped traveling and came home full time, I learned something my wife had apparently known for years: she had built a life without me, and my presence in it was an intrusion. She told me directly — not in the heat of a fight, but as a plain statement of fact — that she had gotten used to life without me and that having me around just threw everything off.
I had spent nearly two decades away from home, telling myself I was sacrificing for my family, while my family was quietly reorganizing around my absence. The lie wasn't malicious. It was mutual. We were both running the same covert contract in opposite directions, both feeling unloved, both finding ways to explain it that didn't require us to say the thing that was actually true.
The hardest part was what she had told our children. That I was away because I didn't love them as much as she did. That my work trips were evidence of misplaced priorities rather than the reason there was food on the table. I don't say that to villainize her. I say it because I've come to understand it as the same wound expressing itself in a different direction — a woman who felt unloved telling the story of her unlove to the people who couldn't leave. She must have been telling herself the same story she was telling them. That she wasn't very loved. That she wasn't very important. That the man who kept leaving was leaving because she wasn't enough to make him stay.
Two people, both drowning in worthiness culture's oldest lie, passing it down to the next generation like an heirloom neither of them wanted.
That is the wound this article is about. Not the divorce. The discovery that preceded it — that I had been building a marriage in my head while my wife had been building a separate life in the house. Forget the eternities. I couldn't even account for the last twenty years.
The Education That Wasn't on Any Syllabus
I was almost fifty years old, recently separated, and I had never seriously dated a non-Mormon woman in my life.
Let me say that again so it lands correctly. I had served a mission in Taiwan. I had attended MIT. I had worked in Boston, New York, Abu Dhabi, Seattle, and Southern California. I had managed complex projects for major corporations and traveled to more countries than most people visit in a lifetime. And I had never navigated the ordinary terrain of dating outside the boundaries of a faith community that had scripted nearly every interaction I'd ever had with a woman.
I didn't really know how to handle a first date where alcohol was present. I didn't know the unspoken rules about physical intimacy and when and how those conversations happened. I didn't know that men and women could be friends after a romance ended, because that wasn't really a thing in the world I came from. I didn't know what to do with desire that wasn't immediately followed by guilt, or with women who found my confusion charming rather than alarming.
What I discovered, over the four years between my separation and the first relationship I was willing to claim publicly, was that the world outside the framework was full of people carrying their own wilderness — and that some of them, for reasons I still don't entirely understand, let me in anyway.
The Women Who Educated Me
The first was an Algerian immigrant whose life made my particular wounds look almost quaint by comparison.
Her husband had beaten her while she was pregnant — in public, badly enough to be arrested. Shortly after their son was born, he took the child and disappeared overseas. She spent months not knowing if her son was in France, in Algeria, or somewhere else entirely. It took U.S. Marines to bring him home, because the boy was an American citizen and his father had taken him across international borders without his mother's consent.
That son was a tall, shy, deeply introverted young man by the time I met him. He had grown up without a father. His half-brother's father wanted nothing to do with him. His stepfather had been emotionally and physically abusive before that marriage ended. He had begun spending more time at a local mosque, looking for something — belonging, structure, a sense of what it meant to be a man — in a place that would hold him.
I taught him how to use a power drill. How to hang something level on a wall. Small things. Father things. The kind of things you learn without noticing when someone is around to show you.
When the relationship ended — her own worthiness culture, rooted in Islam rather than Mormonism but recognizable in every essential way, made a boyfriend she was alone with an existential problem she couldn't resolve — I was more concerned for him than I felt the loss of her. She had proven, many times over, that she was a survivor. He was still becoming and extremism has the ability to make the unwanted feel important. And I had to step back from his life with no goodbye that meant anything, because there was no script for what I had been to him or what it meant that I was leaving.
I think and worry about him still.
The second woman was Israeli-born, American by the time I met her, abandoned by her husband in circumstances that left their own kind of wreckage. She was affectionate and kind in the uncomplicated way of someone who had decided, somewhere along the way, that warmth was a better strategy than armor. She let me come over and fix things around her house. She let me feel useful. And she did something even more valuable than that: she sat with me, patiently, and explained what dating looked like from the outside of the only world I had ever known.
I did not know how to navigate alcohol at a dinner table. I did not know how physical intimacy worked in a relationship that wasn't moving toward a temple sealing. I did not know the ordinary social architecture of a secular romantic relationship, because I had never been in one. She told me, without judgment, without making me feel like a forty-nine-year-old man who should have known better. She just explained it the way you explain something to someone who grew up somewhere else.
When the romance ended and the friendship didn't, I was surprised and grateful. In the world I came from, that wasn't really how it worked. Men and women who had been intimate didn't stay friends. The relationship had a category — dating, engaged, married — and when it left the category, it was over. She found that baffling. She told me she simply couldn't imagine choosing to lose someone she had loved and letting them disappear from her life entirely. So she didn't.
She is still my friend. She is one of the few people who knew me in the wilderness and still knows me now. That is not nothing.
The third relationship that deserves naming lasted eighteen months and gave me something I hadn't had since childhood: a local family to belong to temporarily. She was extraordinarily intelligent — the kind of woman whose vocabulary sent me to the dictionary every other day, whose reading ranged across subjects I had never considered, whose understanding of LDS culture was, improbably, almost as deep as mine. Her best friend was a member of the church. Her father's business partner was a member. She had spent more time around Latter-day Saints than many people who had grown up in Utah, and she understood the culture's textures and contradictions with the particular clarity of an outside observer who had been watching carefully for years.
She brought me home for two Thanksgivings. I sat at her family's table and felt, for the first time in years, the warmth of an extended family that had nothing to do with obligation or covenant. When I filled out a form that required an emergency contact, I put her name. Not my parents. Not my ex-wife. Her. That was the first time I had extended that kind of trust to someone I had chosen rather than someone I had been assigned to.
She was also carrying more than either of us could sustain indefinitely. Mental illness managed carefully but not invisibly. Two teenaged sons with their own profound struggles. A family system with a gravitational pull that was stronger than the two of us. I don't say that as criticism. I say it because the wilderness is full of people carrying enormous things, and the ones who let you in anyway are doing something brave.
And then there were others. A Persian woman who had survived the Iran-Iraq War, escaped her country in the night on a bus under a false name, made it to Turkey, made it to America, got a Masters degree in engineering — and then found the same violence waiting for her in the country that was supposed to be safe, in a marriage to a man who had no excuse. A psychologist carrying wounds from her own childhood that most people never have to name out loud. A nurse from Boston who had been left by her husband and who, when I asked what she needed, said simply that she wanted to be held. Not fixed. Not advised. Just held.
I am not going to catalog everything that happened in those four years. What I will tell you is that it was more than worthiness culture prepared me for, and more human than worthiness culture would have allowed me to admit. There were short relationships and shorter ones. There were nights where two people who knew perfectly well that their lives were incompatible still chose each other for a few hours because feeling wanted — actually, physically, unambiguously wanted — meets a need that no amount of intellectual understanding can reach. Worthiness culture has a word for that. It is not a kind word. The rest of the world, for the most part, just calls it being human.
What I know now, looking back at all of it, is that every one of those women gave me something.
Not despite being broken. Not in spite of the fact that my life was in pieces and my faith was in question and I was a fifty-year-old man learning to date for the first time. Because of all of that. They loved me in the condition I was actually in. And that — not the worthiness I was still trying to perform, not the improvement projects I kept launching, not the intellectual frameworks I kept accumulating — was what actually began to heal me.
The First One That Mattered Differently
Four years after my separation. Two and a half years after my divorce was final. I posted a picture of the two of us on social media.
That sounds like a small thing. It was not a small thing. It meant I was willing to be seen with her. It meant I was willing to let the people who knew me — family, colleagues, old ward members, former mission companions — see that I was in a relationship with a woman I was not married to and had no immediate plans to marry. In the world I came from, that picture carried implications. I posted it anyway.
She was the first woman since my divorce that I actually wanted to stay. Not out of guilt. Not out of obligation. Not because the situation had accumulated enough pressure that leaving felt impossible. I wanted her, specifically, for reasons that were mine.
Which is exactly why what happened next hit the way it did.
The relationship ran hot and then started cycling. Intense connection followed by sudden distance. Conversations that felt concerning but manageable — and then a text message ending everything, followed by blocked contact. We found our way back in late June, just before her birthday, and for a while everything seemed mostly right. Then August brought another ending, another block, silence until October, a brief rekindling that lasted only days before it ended again.
I understand now what I was dealing with — a dismissive avoidant attachment pattern, the clinical term for someone whose nervous system learned, early and thoroughly, that closeness is dangerous and that the safest response to vulnerability is to create distance before the other person can. It's not cruelty. It's a survival strategy. But understanding the pattern in retrospect does not fully account for what it felt like in real time, which was like being picked up and put down repeatedly by someone whose warmth, when it was present, felt more real than almost anything I had experienced.
The reeling that followed the final ending surprised me with its force. I had survived a twenty-year marriage built on obligation. I had navigated a divorce. I had spent four years in a wilderness full of genuinely difficult human situations. And a six-month relationship with a woman I had known less than a year sent me reeling in a way none of that had.
I've thought about why, and I think the answer is simple: it was the first time I had skin in the game. The first time the loss was actually mine — not the loss of an obligation I had been released from, not the loss of a situation I had partly chosen to leave, but the loss of something I had wanted. The grief was proportional to the wanting. And I hadn't wanted something like that, for myself, chosen freely, in a very long time.
What came out of the wreckage was, improbably, agency. I lost weight. I started a business. I bought a house. I am not recommending heartbreak as a wellness strategy. But I will tell you that being forced to rebuild from a loss you actually felt produced something that two decades of obligation never had: the experience of my own capacity. I could do things. I could choose things. I could build something that was mine.
That turned out to matter.
The First Time Someone Stayed
Ann was successful. She owned a business, lived on a small organic farm near the water in coastal Orange County, and moved through the world with the particular ease of someone who had built something real and knew it. She was also, and this mattered more than any of the rest of it, the healthiest person I had been in a relationship with since my divorce.
I don't mean healthy in the sense of uncomplicated. I mean healthy in the sense of self-aware — someone who had done enough of her own work that she could be in a conflict without either escalating it into a catastrophe or pretending it hadn't happened.
I learned this on an ordinary morning that became, quietly, one of the most significant moments of my adult life.
We had spent the early morning in her neighborhood, and something had gone sideways in the way that things go sideways in relationships — small frictions accumulating into something that felt larger, a disagreement about something that was not really about the thing it appeared to be about. I had accidentally put some of her expensive shirts in the dryer. She had said something sharp. I had retreated into the familiar posture of a man who has learned that conflict ends in punishment — quiet, braced, waiting for the verdict.
Trying to mask the panic, I suggested that I needed some time alone. There was concern and then some difficult words. And then, somehow, we worked through it. The air cleared. The conversation found its way back to solid ground.
That night, I asked her directly: "Are we over? Can we ever get over this? I need to know."
She looked at me with what I can only describe as genuine puzzlement. She said she thought I had been acting strange all day. I said — how could I not be, after what had happened between us earlier? And she said something that I have turned over in my mind many times since: Why are you bringing that up again? We worked it out. When I work something out, I move on. I meant that.
I believed the words. I did not yet believe the reality behind them.
It took me several days — not hours, days — to fully accept that she was telling the truth. That the conflict was actually over. That it would not be retrieved from storage in three weeks and deployed against me in the middle of an unrelated argument. That forgiveness, in her understanding of the word, meant the thing was actually finished.
I had never seen that before. Not in my childhood home. Not in my marriage. Not in any of the relationships in the wilderness years. Conflict, in every relational context I had ever inhabited, left a residue. It accumulated. It became ammunition. The score was always being kept, even when no one admitted it.
Ann didn't keep score. Not because she was a saint, but because she had decided, somewhere in her own formation, that carrying old grievances was a waste of a life she had worked too hard to build.
That single exchange — the puzzlement on her face, the simplicity of her words, the days I spent slowly allowing myself to trust them — did more for my understanding of what healthy relationship repair actually looks like than anything I had read, heard in a podcast, or learned in a workshop. It was not information. It was experience. My nervous system felt it in a way my intellect never could have produced on its own.
What the Wilderness Was Actually For
Here is what I want to say to anyone reading this who is in the middle of their own wilderness — recently divorced, or long divorced, or never married and quietly wondering why every relationship seems to stall in the same place:
The healing does not happen before the relationship. It happens inside it.
I know that is not what you were told. The advice in most recovery frameworks — religious and secular alike — suggests that you do your work first, that you become whole before you bring yourself to someone else, that the responsible thing is to heal in isolation and emerge ready. That advice is not wrong exactly. It is just incomplete in a way that matters.
Because the wounds that worthiness culture leaves are not intellectual wounds. They are nervous system wounds. They live in your body, in your instinctive responses, in the way you brace when someone's tone changes and the way you interpret silence as abandonment and the way you assume that every conflict is the beginning of the end. You can understand all of that perfectly — read every book, attend every workshop, articulate the pattern with clinical precision — and still, the moment you are actually in a relationship and something goes wrong, your body will do what it learned to do long before you knew there was anything to unlearn.
The only laboratory for that kind of healing is the relationship itself.
What I found in the wilderness — in the relationships that lasted years and the ones that lasted hours, in the women who let me into their complicated lives and the ones who just needed company for a night — was not what worthiness culture had prepared me to look for. I was not looking for evidence of my own value. I would have told you I wasn't doing that. But somewhere underneath all of the activity and the intellectual frameworks and the self-improvement projects, that is what I was doing. I was collecting evidence.
And what the evidence said, accumulated over four years and more human encounters than I expected, was this: you are lovable in the condition you are actually in. Not the improved version. Not the version that has resolved the faith questions and figured out the attachment patterns and accumulated enough wealth and become whatever it is you think you need to become before you deserve to be chosen. The current version. The confused, imperfect, still-figuring-it-out version.
The Algerian woman saw it. The Jewish woman saw it and is still my friend because of it. The woman who put me on her emergency contact form saw it. Ann saw it. The nurse from Boston who just needed to be held saw it — and gave me something in return that I hadn't known I needed either.
None of those relationships were mistakes. Not even the ones that ended badly. Not even the ones that lasted only a night. They were the education. And the thing they taught me — the thing no worthiness framework ever could — is that love is not a reward for performance. It is what happens when two people who are both imperfect decide, for whatever reason and for however long, to show up for each other honestly.
That is what was missing in the marriages. Not effort. Not faithfulness. Not sacrifice. Honesty. The willingness to say: this is who I actually am, this is what I actually need, this is what I actually feel. The covert contract collapses the moment you stop running it. What replaces it is not certainty. It is just the truth. And the truth, it turns out, is something people can actually connect with.
The Question I Haven't Answered Yet
I want to be honest about something I have not resolved.
I still don't entirely know who I am in relation to the faith I was raised in. There are aspects of the doctrine I cannot return to. There are aspects of who I am — how I understand God, how I understand family, how I understand the next life, the language I reach for when I am trying to describe what matters most — that are so thoroughly shaped by forty years inside that framework that removing them would not leave me more free. It would leave me less myself.
What I know is that I need to be understood by someone who has lived something like what I have lived. Not necessarily someone who is still a member, or someone who has left, but someone who knows what it cost. Someone who understands why the question is still open. Someone who doesn't need me to resolve it before they can be in the room with me.
That is not a small thing to ask. It is also not an impossible one.
The wilderness was not a detour. It was the path. And the women who walked parts of it with me — each one carrying her own impossible history, each one loving me in the condition I was actually in — gave me something the church's framework always promised and never quite delivered:
The experience, felt in my body and not just understood in my head, that I was worthy of being loved before I was finished becoming worthy of it.
That is what this series is about. And it started, as most true things do, not in a classroom or a chapel or a self-help book.
It started in the mess of being human with other humans who were also in the mess.
Worthiness Culture is a six-part series at Unchaperoned Life, written for midlife singles who are done performing and ready to find out what love looks like when it's built on something real.