Why mope around the house as my marriage is dissolving?

Enough already!

Super Energized Ready for Action Filled with Possibility

That’s the motto, man.

SERAFPN for short. Too angelic?

Dial back the years to the last big break-up, the one so distressing I knocked myself unconscious walking up Hyde Street, tears running down my face…walked straight into a tree. Passersby took me the emergency room at California Pacific. How pathetic was that!

My son Sam came straight away from Boston and on his first night with me said, “We’re watching Swingers,” the classic Vince Vaughn film. Vaughn plays a self-proclaimed master of seduction who shows his broken-hearted buddy how to make connections and get the attention of women.

Before he left, Sam wrote in red maker across my bathroom mirror the great line from the movie, “You’re so money and you don’t even know it!”

See why I’m moving to Boston now?

When you’re told by the woman you love, to whom you’re married, that she no longer loves you, or trusts you, or wants to be with you, that you need to move out of the house, that perhaps you should rent a room somewhere, you don’t particularly feel like you’re money.

You feel miserable, deflated, sick in the stomach. In fact you throw up. You feel like a loser.

Fuck that.

“You’re so money and you don’t even know it!”

I wrote about banishing doubt and living in a world of possibility. I can do anything I want now. The only limitations are financial.

I have a plan, and it’s reasonable, even desirable. I’m not moving to Costa Rica though that’s been suggested. Panama is cheap and filling up with expats, but much too hot. Tokyo is too far away.  I’ve been an expat—loved it—but that time is past. I want to be closer to my family.

Returning to the North East isn’t defeat. California didn’t defeat me. My wife didn’t defeat me.  Granted, what I could afford five years ago before getting married I can no longer afford. The rent on the Russian hill apartment I left to move into my wife’s house has jumped from $1850/month to $5400/month. My wife merely upended my life. It’s my decision how to land.

I plan to land Big. Super Energized Ready for Action Filled with Possibility. Why not?

I keep pointing out to my wife that her life will revert to exactly the way it was before she knew me, while mine is completely turned upside down. This is true, but I think the implication is all-wrong. I can now do anything I want. Everything will be new. It’s not a new chapter; it’s a whole new story.

The things I value in San Francisco I will keep. My friends will remain my friends, with new opportunities for connection.

My son Adam will be here—a definite reason to return often. I will remain a member of the South End Rowing Club. I will be psychologically bi-coastal, but based where my heart belongs.

Love again?  Trust love again?

When I moved to San Francisco in 2008, I told myself Never Again. The two big relationships I had had with women in my life—my mother and my first wife—were problematic to disastrous. Been there, done that. I have three terrific sons—no need to try love again.

Of course within months of being in the city I fell madly in love, as I had never before or since. It was beautiful and perfect, and then it was over. And again I told myself Never Again.

That, too, didn’t last. While on holiday in Finnish Lapland, two hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, I experienced an awakening, a sudden feeling that all was right in my world, that I had everything I could possibly want, that my sons meant more to me than any relationship, and I was free of heartbreak.

I returned to San Francisco unburdened by the past and found new love. We found each other. It was beautiful and perfect, for a while, and now it’s over.

I am not telling myself Never Again. More cautious? Yes. Less trusting—of women, and myself? Yes. I am ready to re-examine the old worldview, look for a new possibility.

Maybe I won’t find it.

It doesn’t matter.