Swirly

A really wonderful person recently came into my life.

On our first date, we met at a bar at about 8 pm on a Friday evening. Five amazing conversation-filled hours later, we finally emerged into the night, having both enthusiastically agreed that we should see each other again soon. We shared a goodnight kiss before each departing in our cars.

She isn't a widow, but she is someone who, like me, has experienced a great deal of pain in her life. And like me, she has been very open about sharing her pain through writing. She really has a way with words.

One word that she likes is "swirly" - to describe the feeling one gets in the early stages of dating someone special. I know the feeling well. At the beginnings of my previous relationships I felt swirly all the time.

In the immediate aftermath of this recent first date, I felt swirly. But in the ensuing days, as we continued to see each other more, that swirly feeling wasn't there all the time. It was there some of the time, but other times I didn't feel swirly at all.

When you meet someone really great, you're supposed to feel swirly all the time. Or so my previous experiences had taught me. So I began to question things. Maybe I wasn't even ready to date again, I thought.

And sometimes when I was with her, there was this weird feeling of tension in my mind. Cognitive dissonance, I think, from being with someone who wasn't the someone I was expecting to spend my life with.

I've seen widows describe such things in regards to their attempts to resume dating after losing their spouses. Somehow my loss of Cara never caused this to happen to me, at least not to nearly the same extent. But then, there was a much longer interval between that loss and my entering the dating world.

I decided I should give it some time. My pain was so deep and so recent that there was no way I could just jump right into feeling constantly swirly. But I did really enjoy spending time with this new person, so why not see how it developed?

I began to suspect very soon after the breakup that, in the long run, I would miss my ex's daughter a lot more than I would miss my ex. As more time goes by, it becomes very clear that that suspicion was correct.

About a week ago the new Someone in my life suggested we watch the recent live action Beauty and the Beast movie starring Emma Watson. It was clear to her that I had some hesitation about agreeing. So I explained to her why that was. I have an association between Beauty and the Beast and an extremely emotional incident involving my ex's daughter. I told her the whole story. By the end of it I was quite upset.

I'm well past the point of feeling awkward over talking about Cara with someone I'm dating. Someone who was bothered by the fact that I still love and sometimes want to talk about my late wife would obviously not be the right person for me. Talking to someone I'm dating now about how much I miss the daughter of a still very much alive woman who I was dating only a few months ago? That, on the other hand, does feel a little weird to me. But this new Someone is an incredibly caring person with a wonderful heart and she reacted with nothing but kindness and sympathy.

We've continued to spend more and more time together, and although the pain of my losses is not even close to gone, the cognitive dissonance is receding. I like to remind myself that my brain is constantly rewiring. My mental processes will be different tomorrow from what they are today. I will continue to adapt to the new reality of my life. I'm questioning things less. I'm living in the here and now and more and more I'm finding myself able to enjoy it. I'm not in any position to make long-term plans for my life, but I've found something wonderful for the present and maybe, maybe even for the future.

With each passing day, I feel a little more swirly.