The BetsyG-Spot

By BetsyG

Last January, I started seeing a man who was recently divorced. His wife expressed a desire to separate in September; they were granted a divorce in December. He pushed it through in a fit of pique and she went along, thinking that being 40, single, and jobless with no marketable skills was going to be a party.

When she saw that Mike was falling for someone while her life was going nowhere, she started to freak out. With me in the picture, the window for undoing her mistake was closing. So she asked him back, promising everything but a three-way. Never really wanting the divorce to begin with, he went.

I kicked myself for being so stupid and vowed never again to date someone so freshly divorced.

Fortunately, my next boyfriend, Bob, had been divorced for years, following a mighty effort to work things out. Their central problems seemed to me insurmountable. That marriage was dead and buried.

Much of my communication with Bob was electronic. In our first month dating, I exceeded my text message limit by 200 messages. I had already changed my cellular plan twice for relationships that failed right after, including the one with Mike. So when I added a $20/month unlimited text plan for Bob, I told him: “Kindly do not go back to your ex-wife” or otherwise screw up. No problem. The notion of reconciliation was too ludicrous to consider.

We seemed good when I upgraded to a Blackberry to make texting easier, locking me into that plan for two years. Bob ended up dumping me a week after I got the damned thing, for reasons that were a bit obscure considering how perfectly happy he seemed with me. I got over it quickly, but something kept nagging at me.

Three days before breaking up with me, Bob spent the afternoon at the house he still owned with his ex, overseeing a repair. I didn’t mind if he spent time there; I knew he still liked his ex, but like a sister. Given the timing of our breakup and the fact that my brain never stops churning, though, I couldn’t help but wonder. A week later, I saw that his low-tech ex had become his friend on Facebook. Hmmm.

I check his profile now and again (it’s public, though perhaps not after today), and nothing very interesting was happening until last week when he posted photos from Christmas and the recent ice storm. I knew from earlier posts that he had lost power, which was curious because he lives south of where the major damage occurred. I started to look at his pictures, and nothing in them was familiar. “That’s not his house,” I said to myself while looking at a shot of the living room. Then there was a picture of a dog. “And he doesn’t have a dog.”

His ex has a dog. He’d spent the ice storm at his former marital home, and given the captions (the dog was referred to using the plural possessive), there doesn’t appear to be any way to interpret these photos—and the Christmas pictures that featured not his sister, as I’d first thought, but his ex-wife—other than that the rotted corpse of their marriage had been miraculously resurrected. As one astute friend said, “Who would post photos of their ex-wife on Facebook if they weren’t trying to declare a reunion?”

Of course. Which means I sent not one, but two men back to their ex-wives. In one year.

Anyone with an ounce of entrepreneurial spirit can see there’s a business opportunity here. I haven’t yet quantified, duplicated, and patented the formula that caused these women to want their discarded husbands back, but perhaps with enough experience, I could zero in on it. I assume that something I do to the men makes them more desirable in their wives’ eyes. Mike and Bob were getting healthier, happier, and more interesting when they were seeing me—going to movies and plays, hiking, eating at nice restaurants, and reading books I recommended. With the affection they got from me, they must have projected more confidence, too. And there’s nothing like the specter of another woman with your man to make him more attractive. Kind of like a scarf. Or the right tie.

Once I figure it out, I’m going to franchise it. How’s Ex-Ex for a company name? People would pay in the thousands for this service. But I’ll need to go out with a few more divorced men to refine the process. The payment for success during this research period? Please—just cover my cell phone bill.