Understanding love as presence –not obligation– didn’t immediately make me better at it. It simply made me more aware of how often I’d mistaken closeness for connection, and companionship for healing. Once that realization settled in, it was inevitable that I’d start asking a harder question:
was I ready to share this new version of myself with someone else or was I still learning how to sit with it alone?
That’s when my new expat friend offers to set me up on a date.
Actually — two.
I laugh at first. Dating wasn’t on the itinerary. Costa Rica was supposed to be about healing, not heartache. But healing has a way of making you curious again. So I say yes.
I reach out to the first woman. We plan a date. On the day of, she cancels she’s just taken possession of her new home and is busy painting. Without thinking too much, I offer to help.
She accepts.
So instead of dinner or drinks, I spend the day painting a house with her and her family. It’s honest work. Physical. Grounded. She has four kids. They run around us while we paint walls that will hold future memories I won’t be part of.
When the paint dries and the day ends, I don’t pursue her further.
Not because she isn’t kind or warm but because I recognize something in myself. I don’t want to be a father figure again. Not now. Maybe not ever. And for the first time in a long time, I listen to that truth without guilt.
The second woman? I message her honestly and tell her my age –something my well-meaning matchmaker forgot to disclose. She declines gracefully. No drama. No bitterness. Just reality.
I respect that.
All of this stirs something deeper. If I’m honest, I start wondering whether I want love not casually, not eventually, but for real. So I do what modern humans do when introspection meets loneliness: I download dating apps.
I match with several ticas (slang for Costa Rican women), a nica (a woman from Nicaragua), and a Brazilian woman. The conversations are warm, curious, sincere. Latin women are passionate, open, emotionally present in a way that feels unfamiliar and intoxicating. They’re also deeply humble grounded –in family, effort, and resilience.
The Brazilian woman falls in love quickly. Too quickly. Within a week of online chatting, the intensity is overwhelming. I panic. I pull back. I run.
I’ve done this before. I continue chatting with the ticas –months pass without meeting anyone because I’m far away. Distance becomes both a shield and an excuse. And then I go to the capital.
That’s where I meet the Nicaraguan woman.
To make a long story short we become a couple. Plans unfold rapidly. Working together. Living together. Building something in San José. I say yes again and again, even as part of me quietly wonders why everything feels so fast.
Was I searching for love?
Or was I just lonely in Golfito, craving companionship after weeks of solitude?
I don’t know the real answer. What I do know is this: my yes has always been louder than my doubt. So I move in with her. I start two businesses –ideas she believes will make us money, give us direction, give us stability.
Love, I tell myself, might heal me.
Or maybe I’m asking love to do a job it never signed up for.
That’s a question I won’t answer yet.
Part 2 to come.