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My former husband and I married in 1984 and stayed together for 20 years. After our divorce, we built separate lives and communication was infrequent, and mostly about our son, who is now 32. However, we remained each other’s emergency contact, an important choice as it turned out.
We became close, even best friends, four years ago when both of us faced medical crises and the other was there on continual vigil and for companionship. During the renewal of our relationship, we developed new habits that brought us closer, like cooking and eating dinners together and visiting art exhibits.
And this renewed closeness ended up sparking romance again.
So, for the first time in a very long time, this 70-year-old woman and 83-year-old man went on a vacation last winter to the Turks and Caicos islands. Traveling as a couple after decades of separate travels turned out to be eight days and nights of pleasure — and expanded my definition of love.
Sharing experiences in this tropical paradise along a gorgeous stretch of the Atlantic was exciting, as we toured a place neither of us had ever been before. The familiarity of our relationship added to the joy of the exploration of a new country.
One of the highlights was eating the local food we both loved, particularly the conch that was plentiful at every restaurant. Each afternoon for lunch we had either conch fritters, conch burgers, conch fingers or conch ceviche. This became “our thing,” as did other shared experiences during which we learned and laughed and remembered our history, and rebuilt our relationship.
Vacationing in a location that wasn’t his home or my home left us in a large hotel room that was ours together. The space had a sprawling screened porch, which turned out to be a perfect perk, for me and my ex-husband. When his snoring kept me up, my avid outdoorsman partner was happy to sleep on the cushioned porch chaise, ensconced in palm trees.
Before the trip, he had started spending many nights in my home — the one I worked hard to keep after the divorce. It was mine. But when traveling together, there were no proprietary feelings, which ignited the sense of solidarity we had in the first house we owned together, decades before.
Sharing is good. We were on equal footing, in a hotel, exploring an island as a duo we had never experienced before. These outings and activities brought back sweet memories.
Our common preferences of what we both liked to do on the island rekindled warm memories of what we loved to do when we were younger. Two of these things were long-distance swimming and eating well. Walking along dark unlit streets after dinner at restaurants reminded us of our honeymoon, strolling the night streets in Venice.
While we both had dined in hundreds of restaurants together during our two decades of marriage, everything about dining together in the Turks and Caicos, sitting knee to knee, was fresh and new. Though our bodies and faces had matured, the embers of our youthful fires still burned bright.
Swimming the calm waters brought back remembrance of the many calm ponds and lakes we swam in together along the beaches of upstate New York. On this vacation, we slipped back into our long-lost swimming routines embedded in our muscle memory. Yet, this time around, the undertow created a challenge to our aging bodies when exiting the sea and spontaneously we helped each other reach the shore.
After a week of what I call bliss on an island, I learned that love means staying in the moment, unclouded by judgmental thoughts. Stripped of day-to-day pressures and obligations, cell phones on airplane mode, we were both in a state of floaty relaxation. Without time constraints, there seemed to be extra hours to both explore the terrain and lazily explore each other’s bodies.
Traveling together we became a unit again, with the realization we never stopped loving each other. During the trip, we became “we.” We spent all our time together and yet never felt robbed of our individuality. We had been singular for so long that being a couple felt so comforting. Yet, we retained our individuality; it was like being in a bubble with elastic walls, one we could leave through a trap door at any time, but didn’t want to.
Other tourists assumed we were a married couple and reacted to us as one. Even so, we are both secure and satisfied with our lives back home, as an unmarried couple with a deep friendship and layers of memories. We are exes who have grown closer with time, more loving and entwined in our older years by creating new memories. What we have now is for us more honest and real. At our age, we are grateful for what we have. We are not aspirational.
By the end of the vacation, I understood more deeply that the primary ingredients for lasting love are history, intimacy, respect and truly caring for each other. In 2024, decades after a divorce, my ex-husband now sleeps at my home in New York City every night because we miss each other if he doesn’t. He retains his small apartment as an office and a man cave.
While our days are our own our nights are again, after a long hiatus, twined as one.
Have any of you found love again with an ex-spouse? Let us know in the comments below.
Robert Samuel Hanson
Follow Article Topics: Relationships
