“Are you going to start dating soon, or what?” Chris and I leaned against our still-hot cars in the school pickup line.“Please.” I snorted. “Tien’s fully back on the horse,” she said of our mutual friend whose divorce unleashed a wildness in her.“She’s back on every horse,” I said, getting in my car. “Anyway, I have no time for that nonsense.”“Everyone has time for that nonsense,” she yelled. I wound up my window, conversation over.While it’s true that time was tight, my unwillingness to even consider dating again was about something deeper, and I knew it. At 45, I was a single mother of two teenagers and a 7-year-old. I had just come off a brutal divorce from a man I’d known since I was 10, who grew up three doors down, whose parents knew my parents, whose friends were my friends.He had been part of the architecture of my life, and when his infidelities were revealed through the divorce process, I lost trust in everything, including myself.When I was young, I loved to dive. When I threw a one and a half pike, I’d brush my toes against the end of the board on my way into the water. I always knew where my body was in space, and I never got hurt.One of my recurring dreams is that I’m on a diving board. I start my approach, but as I near the end, the board warps toward the water. There’s no resistance, no control. I am flung sideways, flailing into the air. I land on the hard concrete of the pool’s edge.How could I possibly engage in a new relationship when I didn’t trust my own judgment — when I no longer knew where I was in space?Around the time of that parking lot conversation, I went to a memorial for an old high school friend. During the program, a classmate sang a song he’d written about our mutual friend, something about a falling star, about jumping a fence to search for it, about how we’re all looking for something beyond ourselves. Something about the man performing annoyed me. He sat there, bent over his guitar singing his meaningful song, his straight brown hair falling into his face, his dorky glasses slipping down his nose. He seemed so decent. But I had learned about people who seemed decent.“I’m Geoff,” he said at the reception, plate in hand.“OK,” I said. I was not in the market for friends. I was anti-friend.“Nice song,” I told him, and left.But this man and his song stuck in my head.A year later, I received a friend request from the singing man on Facebook, back when Facebook meant actual friends — not ads and Farmville. I accepted and immediately regretted it because he “poked” me. What the…?! I said to myself. I wasn’t into being poked by strangers. “Hi,” Geoff wrote in a chat message that popped up not long after. “I met you back at the memorial.” I didn’t respond. I wanted to give this person — this singer of touching songs — no encouragement. “So I wondered if you would like to go for a walk.”“I’m not dating,” I wrote back. Best to kill it early. “No one’s asking,” he replied.I went on his dumb walk. We met at the arboretum at the college where he worked. I made a point to leave several feet of space between us.“That’s an oakleaf hydrangea,” Geoff pointed out. “This species isn’t native to this area.”“You mean that bush?” I said. To me, things were trees or bushes.“It has big clusters of late flowers. It’s very beautiful.”He spoke of flowers. He said “species.” I was at once bored and fascinated.“He seemed so decent. But I had learned about people who seemed decent.”When I got home, my daughter was in her room playing with her Littlest Pet Shops, a new toy she was obsessed with. My older kids were watching “Friends” reruns. I was by myself in my kitchen. Two bowls of semi-rotting fruit sat on the counter surrounded by bills and my open computer. I folded my arms and hummed the falling star tune to the drip drip of my endlessly leaking faucet. That fall, Geoff invited me to a baseball game, which seemed harmless, and anyway, I loved the Phillie Phanatic, the team mascot. At the game, he pointed out the players to me and told me little stories about them. We leapt up at a home run. His arm brushed mine. “Excuse me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to, you know...” Touch me. Because that was a thing. Ever since my divorce, I could not be touched. When he dropped me off at my kitchen door, he noticed the dripping faucet.“I can fix that,” he said.“No thank you,” I replied.“It’ll only take 10 minutes.”“Nope,” I said. “I’ll call a plumber,” because you can’t let a man fix your faucet unless you want to owe him, and I didn’t want to owe him. I didn’t want to owe anyone.While there would be no fixing of faucets, we did start meeting for lunch halfway between his work and my home at a Greek diner called The Country Squire. We’d sit across from each other in a booth and order grilled cheese with tomato sandwiches. He’d order a Coke and let me steal sips.One afternoon at the diner, I kicked off my shoes and stretched my legs under the table, resting a single foot on the red vinyl seat beside him. Geoff’s warm hands picked up my stocking foot and moved it onto his lap where he held it, like a mourning dove that needed to be quieted. I allowed it because it was just my foot, anyway. The author and Geoff. "This is us not dating," she writes.Courtesy of Kathryn SmithWhen the check came, we’d split the bill to the penny. If the amount was odd, we kept a tally so the other person would pay the extra penny the next time. No owing. No debts. On our way out, we passed a claw machine in the entryway.“My kids love that stupid thing,” I said. “So do mine,” he said. And we started talking about our children.Then we would come to a certain time every few weeks when I would feel overwhelmed. My ex-husband would sue to reduce child support and I’d have to emotionally armor up, or my children’s cat would start pooping everywhere in the house again. I couldn’t deal with anything. I couldn’t deal with my friend.“I can’t date anyone — not even you,” I’d say, or worse, text. “We’re not dating,” he’d say, but I’d insist I couldn’t see him, and he’d get quiet on the phone, and I’d feel guilty, but it was necessary because I couldn’t be expected to depend on anyone else and anyway, what was he going to do? Scoop my litter box? I couldn’t cope with my own life, let alone someone else’s. I needed to get rid of him.Back in my 20s, when I worked on Wall Street, I learned the term poison pill. It was a defense strategy companies used to avoid hostile takeovers. I had this idea that I needed to make a poison pill of myself. I needed to be repellent.So, I decided not to shower for three days and allowed myself to stink. I told Geoff what I was doing, hoping he would find me disgusting. “So you’re going jungle,” he said.When I unapologetically burped, he’d nod with a certain admiration. When none of this repulsed him, I went nuclear. I passed gas — loudly. He looked up at the sky for a moment, then hummed a note, matching the pitch of my fart like a tuning fork.I gave up my foulness campaign.That winter, I wanted to host a Christmas party. I had done so for years, but after the divorce our house went quiet and dark. Not that year. I invited everyone — my brothers, their families, my parents, my friends, my children’s friends. The one sadness was that our player piano, purchased years ago when the kids were young, stood broken and silent.The evening before the party, I walked into the living room with an armful of garland. The piano lid was open, the front was off, and the guts were exposed. A few tools lay around the pedals, and Geoff was putting a music roll into place. He pushed one lever, and then another. There was a suck of wind and a grind of gears. The keys started playing, “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch.” My kids came running into the living room to stare.Geoff stood up, grease on his hands, as the house filled with music.“Hey,” I said, laughing. “I never said you could fix that.”In 2014, Geoff and I got married because of a rental car. The agent wouldn’t let him share the driving or the payment unless we were married.“You’re kidding,” I said.“Liability,” the agent told us. I turned to Geoff.“Want to get married?”“Is this a trick question?” he asked.We celebrated with family and friends at the Country Squire with grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches and banana splits all around, and then danced on our back patio until we were lame.That was 12 years ago.The author and Geoff at their patio wedding.Courtesy of Kathryn SmithIt would be a tidy ending to this essay to say that Geoff healed my old wounds and filed down my prickly burrs, but that wouldn’t be true. He didn’t fix me. I’m not fixed.But I’m not broken, either.I’m somewhere in between. Back when I first met Geoff, I was fresh off a betrayal from someone I thought I knew. His was a brutal betrayal, and I thought, if I could be so wrong about someone I’d known for 35 years, what else could I be wrong about?I felt that protecting myself was my only option, that self-sufficiency was the same thing as safety, and that vulnerability was a guarantee for hurt. Slowly, over time, I realized betrayal isn’t universal. And trust, even in yourself, can be rebuilt. I still don’t trust easily. My edge is a little sharper. But in my dreams now, when I approach the diving board, it’s firm, with just the right amount of resistance. I spring into the air and rotate one and a half times. My feet graze the board, my hands break the surface, and I slice into the water without a splash. Kathryn Smith’s writing has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, HuffPost (republished by BuzzFeed), Brevity Blog, Philadelphia Stories, and Apiary. She was nominated for Best American Essay 2026, was short-listed for the CRAFT Flash Prose Prize, and twice received honorable mention from Glimmer Train. A Wharton and UC Berkeley MBA graduate, she’s working on a memoir of essays. You can reach her on Instagram @KathrynSmithStories.Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? 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