First there was the waiter who lied and said he owned a health food restaurant. He broke up with me while his semen was still drying on my stomach. Then there were the couple of married guys whom I regretfully hooked up with. Though I didn’t sleep with them, I carried on emotional affairs with each for over a year. There was the mega-rich venture capitalist dying to be an actor, who was going through a horrendous custody battle and drank to cope. And of course the recovering alcoholic who was nine years my junior and relapsed after our first fight. Let’s not forget the Australian rock star who did coke off my bathroom

counter and broke up with me over sushi while he was high. The list goes on and on. But you get the picture.

This barrage of unavailable men whom I pined for again and again proved so painful that I relapsed from twelve years of sobriety, missed work, under- and overate, and began such a strong love affair with my imagination that I took escapism to an out-of-this-world level. I fantasized about a future with these men that was crazy unlikely and would surely have been unsatisfying. Continually, I isolated myself from true friends and family. Bottom line: I stopped taking care of me and did everything in my power to care for those men for whom I was only one of many—an option, not a priority.

I was a love junkie. I was chronically obsessed with a carousel of fleeting romances and heart-wrenching trysts, always ready to saddle up to the next clone of my last “boyfriend.” I used to literally salivate while gossiping with girlfriends about my latest unavailable beau.

None of the men I thought I loved were really there for me, either. I was slipping into a hole, giving too much and needing affection they couldn’t give. But all along, I put on a happy face so they would stick around.

Why did I do that? Of course, I’m sure it had something to do with my formative years, growing up with an emotionally unavailable father, a mother who drinks. However, I tried to take the reins on my life. Always struggling with my weight, I finally got my disordered eating under control and took up running for my sanity. I lost thirty pounds that I kept off for two years. I ate up self-help books like PEZ Candy and journaled and spent time in nature for renewal. But I still chose poorly in the love department, and I still had nobody to call when something really great happened and I wanted a male voice on the other end of the line to tell me how wonderful that thing was.

Making matters worse, I couldn’t take a clue. Men had to practically shake me off of them. Sure, there were guys with whom I was the “unavailable” one, who felt strung along by me, whom I played. However, there’s no denying that a stable of guys who had a stable of women on the side were the ones who endlessly attracted me, and it hurts to think that I wasted so much time on them.

That is, until I met my husband-to-be, Richard. How was he different? Let’s start with the fact that he was completely honest from Day 1 about who he was seeing when and how many women he was hooking up with. He let me know ahead of time if he was going to post a picture of himself with another woman on social media—partly because he knew that I wasn’t ready for monogamy and partly because he was. He didn’t want me to get upset that he was seeing other people, even though I was fully aware of it and was unready to commit to more than a couple of dates a week and a few phone calls here and there.

His friends tell me that early on he proclaimed, “She’s special. She’s not ready, but I don’t want to give up on her. I want to wait.”

And I was honest with him about the men I was seeing. Still we went out and had great fun together. He put zero pressure on me to hook up. That alone made him radically different from what I was used to. It enabled me to show him my true self, unencumbered by the vulnerability and web of complications that sex can weave. (The level of honesty we engaged in is perhaps not for everybody, but it was a springboard for our whole relationship.)

He called me when he said he was going to. That was a big one. He returned my calls in a timely fashion, even when he was busy. He was punctual for dates. He was respectful of what I wanted to do on outings. He listened and asked many questions about my life. He was nonjudgmental and seemed genuinely curious about me. When I told him I was a lesbian for much of my twenties, he didn’t switch gears into a lascivious heavy breather the way many others had before him. When I voiced private things about myself in bits and pieces, he didn’t press for more details. He respected the process of getting to know me. He didn’t pry but was gentle.

When I finally told him, “I like you,” he heard me and offered to be monogamous. But he didn’t require it. He said he wanted to make that commitment because he knew himself well. He knew his ability to shut down and “sample the buffet” of women in his life when shit got real. He chose to be fully available to me and not avail himself of other women when the going got tough, which the going inevitably does from time to time in a mature relationship. He didn’t run when I was hormonal or angry or irrational or said airhead things (sometimes it shocks me how smart and dumb I can be from one moment to the next).

Is our relationship perfect? No way! Do I say any of this to sound better than anybody else? Hell no. I divulge it because I’ve been through hell and back and I know what a dude who wants—and is ready for—a commitment feels like and what he doesn’t. I say it because I hate seeing people struggling to be seen and heard. Life is hard enough without having to barter and bargain and arm-wrestle for love.

We now have a beautiful baby daughter and live together in a new home we picked out together. I never would have imagined this would be my life by my midthirties. But it is. Through a process of realization, manifestation, prayer, self-love, fate, and embracing my difficult truths, I somehow ended up here. And it was hard-won.

The kind of life I have now is filled with the kind of love I always dreamed of but was unsure I could attain, to be honest. And it has changed my heart. It’s given me confidence I never had. There’s clarity in my decision making, because I have a purpose—my family. Being a mother is the most important role I’ll ever play. Being loved, and wanted, is a feeling I understand by heart now. There’s no dissimilarity between the life I want and the life I have. Living in the present moment is a choice, an act of faith I can fully embrace because I’ve known bitter and I’ve known sweet. Choices made in the past—walking into the fires of dangerous situations and the arms of dangerous men—by the grace of something greater than me, led me to the doorstep of my current life.

In fact, the level of honesty my mate and I share is peerless. And that’s the thing with available men. They don’t run when you show your true colors. They stick around to see what’s underneath the façade—the mask you wear in public versus the true you, revealed only in private.

Would I ever again throw myself at somebody who didn’t want me—be it a friend, an employer, or somebody else? I sure hope not. Despite the rush of butterflies that once followed contact with an unavailable man, those winged things ain’t got nothing on the life-changing impact of love and security.

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