20 Years With BigDog: What I Want Every Divorced Woman Over 60 to Know

First things first — you’re probably wondering about the name. If you’re a divorced woman over 60 wondering if real love is still possible — this one’s for you.

BigDog is my husband. That’s what I call him here, and that’s what most people call him now. It started with a class project, of all things. He had a Harley at the time, and the title of a class project website that I created— was him on his bike — was BigDog on the Road. It stuck the way the best nicknames do, the ones that aren’t trying too hard and just fit.

He knows I write about him. He is okay with it.

That tells you almost everything you need to know about him right there.

The Marriage That Came Before

I was married for 23 years. His name was Gary. I met him when I was fourteen years old.

I want to be fair to that marriage because it deserves fairness. It wasn’t a bad man or a dramatic betrayal. It was two people who started young and tried hard and eventually became strangers to each other under the weight of a life that didn’t go as planned.

Gary worked offshore. Oil rigs. Hard, dangerous, physical work — and he loved it the way some people love the thing that makes them feel most like themselves. That job wasn’t just what he did. It was who he was.

He was 39 years old when a work injury took it away from him.

I was 35.

Everything flipped overnight. He couldn’t work. I had to. I went from stay-at-home mom to the one holding everything together — the bills, the house, the kids, the fear I couldn’t show anyone because someone had to keep it all moving. Our daughter was 4. Our son was 9. I was running on fumes and stubbornness and the particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t show on your face but lives somewhere deep in your chest.

I stopped being a person during those years. I became a function.

And somewhere in the grinding day-to-day of just surviving, we lost each other. Resentment crept in on both sides — slow and quiet, the way it does when nobody means for it to. He lost himself when he lost that job. I became someone neither of us recognized. We didn’t fall apart because we were bad people. We fell apart because we were two people buried under something heavier than most marriages survive, and we never found our way back.

The Therapist’s Office

We tried. I want to say that clearly. We sat across from a therapist and we tried.

And that is where I knew.

Not when the papers were filed. Not when I moved my things out. I knew in that office, looking at him across the room — really looking — and seeing it in his face. He was done. Not mean about it. Not dramatic. Just done. And something in me went quiet in a way it hadn’t in years.

I drove home knowing our marriage was over.

The grief that followed was real. You don’t spend 23 years building a life with someone and walk away without mourning it. I mourned the marriage, the future we were supposed to have, the version of us that existed before everything broke.

But underneath the grief — so quiet I almost missed it — was something else.

Relief.

Not because I wanted it to end. Because I had been treading water for so long I had forgotten what it felt like to just stand somewhere and breathe. And some part of me, even in all that pain, knew I was about to find out what that felt like again.

The Thing I Did That Felt Completely Unhinged

I joined Match.com.

This was before online dating was something people talked about at dinner parties. Before your coworker had a success story. Before apps were just a normal Tuesday. This was the era where admitting you were on a dating site felt like confessing something you should probably be embarrassed about.

I did it anyway.

Terrifying — yes. I stared at the profile I’d created and thought, who is going to want this? You are a middle-aged divorced woman with two teenage kids and a life that looks nothing like the plan.

Embarrassing — also yes. I kept it quiet at first, held it close like a secret I wasn’t sure I was allowed to have.

Liberating — eventually. More than I expected. Because here is what nobody tells you about putting yourself back out there after a long marriage: it forces you to answer questions you have been avoiding for years. What do I actually want? What do I like? Who am I when I’m not just running on survival mode?

I went on dates. Some were awkward. Some were funny in ways I couldn’t have scripted. A few were memorable for entirely the wrong reasons. I kept going because giving up felt worse than the discomfort of trying.

The Day I Messaged Him First

And then there was BigDog.

I messaged him first. I want to own that.

His profile caught my attention and something made me reach out — which, if you knew how guarded I was at that point, is its own small miracle. I had walls. Good ones. Built over years of hard living and hard lessons. I was not exactly walking around open and available. I was more like: cautiously present, one eye on the exit.

He wrote back.

We started talking.

I did not fall fast. I want to be honest about that too, because I think women who have been through what I had been through deserve to hear it said plainly: I kept my walls up for a while. I had earned those walls. I was not about to hand them over to someone just because he seemed nice and made me laugh.

But he was patient. And he was consistent. And slowly, without me fully noticing it was happening, I stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He wasn’t performing. He wasn’t trying to be something for me. He was just himself — steady, funny, real — and one day I looked up and realized the walls had come down somewhere along the way and I hadn’t even felt it happen.

What Twenty Years Actually Looks Like

We have been together twenty years now. Married twelve.

I want to be honest about what that means because I think the honest version is more useful to you than the pretty one.

It means ordinary Tuesday mornings. It means we have annoyed each other and chosen each other, over and over, in the quiet undramatic ways that don’t make anyone’s highlight reel but make a real life. It means I know what it is to be loved by someone who is not trying to fix me, manage me, or need me to be smaller than I am.

It means the woman who sat in that therapist’s office — hollowed out, not sure who she even was anymore, terrified of what came next — built something genuinely good on the other side of the hardest years of her life.

And I need you to really hear that.

What I Want You to Know

If you are in the middle of a gray divorce right now, or you are on the other side of it and the silence is so loud you can’t think straight, or you are on a dating app feeling completely ridiculous for even trying — I am talking directly to you.

I was the woman who kept everything running while falling apart inside. I was the woman who sat in a therapist’s office and felt a 23-year marriage end in real time. I was the woman who was embarrassed to admit she was on Match.com, who kept her walls up long past when it was necessary, who had to learn — slowly, imperfectly, stubbornly — how to stop just surviving and start actually living.

I messaged first. He answered. Twenty years later, here we are.

Now I am sitting on a patio I love, in a home I have made cozy and completely my own, married to the man they call BigDog, watching a dog named Luna patrol the fence line like it is her full-time job. I have a blog where I get to be completely, unapologetically myself. I have a style I actually love. I have a life I chose.

None of this existed inside my old life. There wasn’t room for it.

The ending was not the end.

Don’t count yourself out.

Want to read more of this story? Starting Over After Divorce | What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Reinventing Yourself After 60 | Friendships After 60