This is my first post here. And it'll be my last, because I'm not at the point in my life, where MB forum would be an aid. It's probably going to seem like an odd post, but, I hope you find this odd post somehow encouraging and positive, because its a view of someone who was in the middle of all this himself, two decades ago, and how it looks to me today.

I won't name any names, that wouldn't be right, but 20 years ago, yes 2001, you had a forum member going through a divorce. I will call her Brooke, while that wasn't her name.

And I had gone through a divorce a year earlier I made so many divorce posts myself, but MB wasn't my forum, I used a different one. and I met Brooke online at a website about "Love" not this one, apparently we both had our "divorce" website and our "love" chat site .

Because I have only ever been in a relationship with 3 women in my life, I had a random thought about her today, not to rekindle anything, lol, but in my life, if I let you in, you're in. I want to know how my old friend is doing. That seems right to me. I tried to search her up by her old email address, I didn't find her, but I did find her posts here - several thousand of them. Well, they are public, so I read a few.

It kind of shed a lot of light on 2001, and even her life after that, a bit. The posts read exactly like the person I knew, she shared the same thoughts with me - except that during our 6 month relationship she had been dating other people the entire time. That was probably understood, I don't think we were exclusive. Still, I didn't exactly remember it that way, so, now I remember it better, lol

The posts read like a person in crisis. She was in crisis. As was I , in those days. We were recovering from the difficulty of divorce.

For 6 months Brooke and I shared a relationship. I see from perusing her old posts, I wasn't any big impression on her life. But she was on mine. Frankly in those days, I loved her. She was only the second person I had ever loved. While you knew her in crisis (as did I), I also knew her in real life, and she was truly a caring and wonderful person.

We were together maybe 6 months. We broke up because she felt so strongly she couldn't take a relationship out of the divorce crisis, the timing of when we met would always have been wrong. She let me down so easy, it was quite skilled. It is always "hard" to have a breakup, but for me the novelty of being rejected by someone that actually cared for me and was protecting my feelings rather than harming them, was a novelty, that in some ways I treasured. You know it felt like a much better way of separating than most divorces! Six months later, I began dating a woman that is now my wife. We married in 2002, we've had 19 years together (and I hope another 19!) I adopted her 2 year old daughter, and we raised her together, and my daughter is now 21 and doing very well, living on her own.

I searched up Brooke today, to figure out what happened to my old friend. I will probably never really get to speak to Brooke again. So I will speak to you all instead, like her, I made thousands of posts during the height of my crisis, so I know the feeling of talking divorce. And now, I feel like I'm doing one last post on divorce, 20 years later. Wherever you are Brooke, God Bless. I hope you found happiness, and I believe you did, because as you would say, we were the strong ones.