8 Weeks From Mai

I sat in a Nashville apartment at 61, certain I'd be alone. The dark makes temporary feel permanent.

In January of 2023, my tumultuous three-year relationship ended, and I sat in my Nashville apartment thinking about what a man does at 61 with two failed relationships in four years. I was divorced at 59 after 24 years. A relationship after that which consumed three more years and ended anyway. I kept returning to the same answer:

This is just how it is for you now.

I want you to look hard at that sentence, because I’d bet money you’ve said some version of it to yourself: this is just how it is for you now. It sounds like being a realist, but it can be a verdict. And I handed it to myself, without thinking there might be something more to it.

I call it “Cave thinking.”

In my book The Last 10 Pounds I wrote about the difference between a cave and a tunnel:

“You feel like you’ve walked into a dark cave and there’s no way out. The truth is that if you keep walking, you’ll see a light at the other end. You weren’t in a cave. You were in a tunnel. Everything passes.”

Cave thinking has a tell: you start arranging your life around the idea that the dark is permanent. You create routines that assume nobody else is coming. The plans cancelled with no announcement, because men like you don’t deserve the good version. The opinions that harden around your solitude like a cast. Listen to your own vocabulary for the tell, too. Cave sentences lean on “always” and “never”:

“I’ll always be alone.”

“This never works out for me.”

A man who has stopped trying talks in life sentences. I did it twice, once in Puerto Rico and once in Nashville. Different situations, the same cave. Or so I’d decided.

What I couldn’t see from inside

Here’s the part I couldn’t have known that January, and it’s the reason I’m telling you this: in March of 2023, two months after that end, I met Mai. We were married in October of 2024. The woman who rebuilt my understanding of what a marriage could feel like was eight weeks away while I was handing down a life sentence of being alone to myself.

I can’t promise you a Mai. Nobody can. What I can tell you from my own life is this: every dark season I have ever been in ended, and from the inside, every single one of them looked permanent. The dark makes the temporary feel permanent. It’s one thing it always does. I’ve watched this from both sides now:

• At 47 I was so broke I considered suicide so my wife and daughter could collect on my life insurance policy.

• At 59 I was certain the rented duplex was how the story ended.

• At 61 I was sure the Nashville apartment was the sequel that proved it.

I was wrong twice in four years, and the second time I was eight weeks from the best thing that ever happened to me.

If you're doing the walking in the dark right now, you don't have to do it without another man who's been through it. I send out an essay every Sunday.

The walking

A tunnel only pays off if you walk. For me the walking had nothing to do with scanning for exits. It was the unglamorous work I’d already started and kept doing in the dark: my belief work, my training, my food log, the faith I was still slowly growing in. None of it made the dark brighter that January. All of it was moving me through, which is a thing you cannot measure from inside.

The moves to Puerto Rico and Nashville had taught me the difference the hard way: changing your scenery is not walking. The work is in the walking. Progress in a tunnel often isn’t obvious, and expecting it to be can reinforce your feeling that nothing is changing. You bank the work on trust that you are moving through it.

“Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.”
(Psalm 30:5)

David wrote that on the far side of the night he was describing. During the night, I’m sure it must have seemed like wishful thinking. But that doesn’t make it less true.

If you’ve started arranging

You know whether you’ve done it. The verdicts you’ve handed down to yourself about how it is for you now. The camp chair you’ve set up in what you’ve decided is a cave. I’d ask you to treat every one of those verdicts as what it is: a guess, made in the dark, by the least qualified judge available, a man who can’t see ten feet ahead.

You don’t get to see the exit before you’ve earned it. Nobody does. The work you do in the dark is not wasted; it’s the walking, and the walking is the whole difference between a man who lives in a cave and a man who comes out the other end of a tunnel.

Keep walking. It’s a tunnel, not a cave.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.