Hi everyone.

My situation is so similar to the original poster’s that I almost feel that every reply is directed at me too. There are so many parallels even down to the ages of the parties involved: I am 30 years old and some months ago I was left by my 25 year old fiancee. I wanted to be married and have a family by now and now my goal is to have that by age 35 just like you Josh.

I am going on 3 months of absolutely no contact (and I don’t use any social media) so I have no idea whether my ex is dating a pill popping dishwasher but I know how she sleeps around when she is single which drives me crazy with rage and jealousy.

I’m a couple of months further down the road so I was going to chime in with some advice and what’s helped me so far, but what I was going to say seems to contradict what Anita is saying, so instead of adding the confusion of conflicting viewpoints I would like to better understand what Anita means and maybe I will find that we are not in such disagreement after all.

My issue is that the advice of dating when still attached to an ex seems counter-intuitive to me because that is the opposite of the commonly suggested wisdom of taking your time to heal, detach and work on independent self driven happiness before attempting to date again.

Now Anita, I’m aware that maybe this is not what you are suggesting at all, as you are clearly saying that it is a good time to “interview” and you never mentioned that he should actually date at all.  Perhaps it is simply my issue that I have a hard time separating “interviewing” from “dating” in my mind so this is where I could use some clarification (I hope I am not hijacking this thread too much, but my thinking is that is the OP or anyone else reading this are like me then maybe they could use some clarification too)

Did you mean that he should interview completely separate from dating? As in dispassionately (and thus unbiasedly) collect information about potential partners now to help decide which one to date when the time comes?  Or to collect the information with the intention of going right ahead with a “hire” when one is found?