Steps forward in real life tend to make the imp that lives in my brain backpedal frantically. "Run, run!" he yips, waving his arms about, Kermit-like. "It's too much! Ruuuun!"

I've gotten much, much better at shutting him up. He shrills away, but I've learned, mostly, not to pay attention. But when it's a hard week, when I'm feeling overwhelmed, when I'm sad — that's when his voice gets harder to ignore.

This moving thing, for example. It's big. Sure, I was thinking about moving anyway. Sure, it's not all about the boy. But part of it is. Taking this step says we think we're actually going to make it. On my bad days, this is what I worry about: What if we're not? What if the magic and wonderfulness and perfection of what this actually hinges on is the fact that it's long distance?

It didn't help that our cohabitation experiment wasn't a success. That I handled it badly. That he's backtracked since then.

Then there's this month: finalizing the legal documentation of my inability to make a relationship work. Just when I think that I am past this, that I've come to terms, it rears its head and reminds me that I don't have a great track record. 

"What about this?" crows the imp, waving legal papers at me. "Why would you think anything ever works out?"

Normally, I know, deep down, that my fears are largely unjustified. That I'm worrying about something that is so "might be, maybe," that I really shouldn't worry at all. This, though, this feels more real. It feels immediate, and it feels scary, and it's hard to talk myself down.

There's nothing to do, I suppose, but do — imp or no — and see what happens.

Having a long distance relationship was great. Before. Had we not lived 3,000 miles away from each other, we wouldn't have made it past a month. I would have cut and run. He would have cut and run. We would have gone too fast — with feelings that strong, that quick — panicked, and fled. The distance forced us to take it slow. The distance did much to quell my panic. The distance kept me from feeling I was giving anything up. 

But now — now it's harder. 

Here's the problem with falling in love again: You get lonely. I like living alone. I like coming home and having a quiet apartment, my cats, my space — but now I find that once I've had a couple days — or, sometimes, a couple hours — of that, I want him here.

I'm not lonely because I don't enjoy my own company, but because I want his. I like knowing what he's done with his day. I want to be able to have a minute with someone who loves me after a difficult day. I want to go to sleep and know that I'll see him when I wake up.

Feeling this way is scary. Because loving someone means you give up being perfectly fine on your own. It means there's someone to miss. It means that you start to count on someone other that yourself.

There are times I don't want to be in that position. There's a lot we give up when we open ourselves up to someone. Sometimes, that's a tough trade. 

We've always talked, me and Mike, about the things that scare us about this. Sometimes, though, it crosses the line from comforting to pessimistic. 

We don't ever really argue, but we have had some draining "conversations." It occurred to us, a bit ago, that these "discussions" are all over hypotheticals.

Now, why is that? Everything, as it is now, is close to perfect. We are exactly what the other wants, as and where we are.

The problem is, we're worried it won't stay like that. What if I never stop being scared? What if we find out, once we're in the same city, that our schedules and our lives aren't compatible? What if someone eventually wants to move in and someone else doesn't? Better to call it all off now, it will never work, we're all going to die.

I look back over the things I've written during a Typical Alice Relationship Breakdown, and they've all been over What Ifs.

It's one thing to be aware of potential issues and deal with them, but it's another to spend this much time worrying that one day it will all fall apart. After all, who's to say that we won't keep on adjusting successfully as we go?

I suspect I didn't enjoy the marvelousness of this past year as much as I could, and that's just ridiculous. This is the most wonderful person in the world, for me, and I should be leaping about in happiness all the time, not fretting over potential future issues.

So that's what I'm working on: taking it as it is now. Dealing with things when and if they come up.

It's hard, after going through a divorce, not to believe that everything will come to an untimely end. But somewhere, I'm sure, there's a balance, before reason becomes sabotage.

My dad and stepmom met Mike last spring, and they said they liked him, but, really, what else would they say? Since they visited my sister last week, I figured I could check in with her and make sure.

So I checked. And, yes, they do. But...

"They think you're getting married," my sister said.

"What?" I squawked.

This is me we're talking about. Put aside that whole not wanting to get married again — this relationship's barely a year old! We haven't even lived in the same city yet! We're not even ready to live together! Plus that whole my-divorce-isn't-even-freaking-final-yet thing.

I casually mentioned this.

"I know, I know," she said. "But Dad thinks so, because you're coming to visit me."

Since Mike and I will be spending Christmas on the East Coast, part of our travel plan involves stopping in Boston to see my sister.

"SO?" I asked.

"Well, when I said you were both coming, he got all thoughtful. You're at his place, then Mike's parents', then here. He said maybe you were making ‘the family rounds.' ‘She must have something to announce!' he said."

"Don't worry," she said hastily, as I started sputtering. "I set him straight."

"But, but...how could he possibly think that?  Doesn't he know me at all?"

"Please," my sister said, "this is our dad. He asked me my senior year of college if my boyfriend and I were pinned. His world is a different place than ours."

Thank God their conversation happened. Otherwise, Thanksgiving might have been awkward, without me even realizing. 

It is happening. The great Family Holiday Trade.

Mike and I started dating a little over a year ago, a month or so before Thanksgiving. I ended up spending my Thanksgiving break in New York that year, but we went our separate ways on the actual day. There was no way I was taking the train to DC with him to his parents'; we had just started dating. We hadn't put a name on this. We were still holding things at arm's length. Just meeting parents at this point would have been too much.

This year he's coming to my dad's for Thanksgiving and I'm going to his parents' for Christmas. It feels at once completely logical and the Scariest Thing in The World.

Before you scoff at this 33 (Gah! 34!) year old woman's panic at bringing a boy home, at spending a week at a boy's parents' house, let me remind you that Jake and I started dating when I was 15. This is all new to me.

I don't have a childhood home at this point, but my dad's house has always been the place to go when things are hard. He and my stepmom are a happy little island of normalcy in my otherwise questionably functional family. It's quiet there. People are nice to each other. Jake hated it, so I tended to visit alone. I don't think of it as a place where I have a partner.

I'm stupidly nervous about Mike coming with me. What if he hates it, too? There's nothing to do — my family and I play cards, watch movies, putter around the living room. That's what I like about it. What if he doesn't? What if he's bored and cranky?

Plus — there's something so definite about this. If he comes to my parents' house, he's for real. He'll get to know my family. They'll know him. Every step in this direction makes an ending that much messier.

I suppose, at some point, all of these "first things" will be over and then I can stop worrying about them. Right? 

Tomorrow is my second unmarried birthday.

I hate my birthday. It's been a bad day for years — a day to be disappointed. A day of promises that your partner will come home, only he won't. Or he'll forget. Or he'll blow the whole thing off as not a big deal, anyway.

Plus that whole Husband Moving Out the Day After thing — that will kind of taint your birthday — well, forever.

What was I thinking? How was this in any way a good idea? For the rest of my life, no matter how happy I am, no matter how good a place I'm in, November 14th will always be the anniversary of this, so far, hardest day. My birthday will always be the anniversary of the day before: the Day Before the Hardest Day. The Last Day.

That first birthday alone — it wasn't bad. It really wasn't.  But boy, did I work for that. The effort that went into not making it a big deal, making sure there were no expectations, making sure it was just any other day — it was a lot.

This year, I just can't muster the energy. I'm tired. The last couple of weeks have been hard. The effort involved in being that nonchalant, of steeling and girding and getting myself together so Thursday won't be crushing — the very thought exhausts me. To the point where I'm thinking one day of suck might be better than the week of prep.

The thing is, I used to really like my birthday. Not that anything big or important would ever happen, and not that I wanted that. But it was a nice day, and usually nice things would happen. Now, though, it just leaves me lonely and sad and wondering why no one will ever love me as much as my cat does.

I wonder what it's going to take to make that go away. I guess if something really amazing and magical happened on my birthday, that might knock the other associations into second place. Like, I don't know, Josh Groban showing up in my kitchen to make me pancakes. But I'm not holding my breath.

One of the things that pleased me the most about being single was avoiding the Who Do We Spend the Holidays With Discussion. In fact, I was pleased by the entire concept of Celebrating Any Damn Way I Felt.

I love holidays. I love decorating, I love sending cards, I love giving presents, I love the food that only appears once or twice a year.  Jake does not love holidays — any of them. Not Thanksgiving, not birthdays, not Halloween, not Valentine's Day, not Arbor Day. He would much prefer not to be bothered, and he would much have preferred that I ignored all of them along with him.

In addition, there was the religious issue: Jake is Jewish and I am Christian. He doesn't, however, actively practice or celebrate Jewish holidays. He didn't want me to decorate or cook or do anything to recognize Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. But he also didn't want a Christmas tree in the apartment.

"Of course you can have one," he'd say. "It's important to you." But he'd complain about it until it came down. He'd bring up my "disrespect" every time we had a fight.

Jake doesn't get on well with his family. His family doesn't get on well with each other. His family makes mine look like a '50s sitcom. Combine his family politics with his feelings about holidays in general and his feelings about Christmas in particular, my feelings about holidays in general and Christmas in particular, his difficulty with compromise, and the fact that, between us, we had five family branches scattered across the country, and you can see that discussing where to spend a handful of days each winter became a dreaded diplomatic dance.

We never, in all the years we were together, found a way to support each other on this, to end up in a place where we each felt we were listened to and acknowledged.

There's nothing like posting your procrastination on a blog to give you that needed nudge. Today, I sold what I referred to recenly as my post-divorce jewelry — the gifts that Jake gave me over the course of our marriage.

The thing about the Internet, it really leaves us no excuses. There's no use pleading, "But I don't know where to go!" Logging on to yelp.com makes it difficult to get away with that kind of thing.

I dumped my wares before the jeweler: a necklace, earrings, and anklet set in amethyst and gold. The giant gold pendant that won the My Husband Gives Me Uglier Gifts Than Your Husband contests for years. A dozen pearls I never got around to stringing. And my wedding ring.

Much of it the jeweler didn't want. Pearls, he said, he's seeing "by the buckets." No one wants pearls these days, he said. The amethyst set he didn't want either, but gave me the card of a place that might. The pendant he took. And the ring he took.

I hadn't initially thought to bring the wedding ring. All that other jewelry, I never wore. I had never liked any of it. I kept it all in a box and never thought about it. Strangely, I had never thrown the ring into that box. I grabbed it last minute, an afterthought, as I left the apartment.

Seeing it there on the counter, waiting to be weighed — it was a strange feeling. As the jeweler and I filled out the surprising amount of paperwork involved in the transition, it just sat there, looking at me. And I had a pang. I'm not sure why. I've hardly looked at it since the day I put it away. That whole last year, I found excuses not to wear it. I'd been glad to take it off permanently.

I'm still pondering the "Is Love Enough?" question of my last post.

Specifically: that belief that there is love there, even if the relationship failed. Even if the other stuff — the friendship, the caring, the consideration — isn't. Or isn't anymore.

A lot of us believe that, right? That the love part doesn't just go away? That the fact of our divorces doesn't negate that?

Does my theory that love can't stand alone actually apply?

Or is it all because believing otherwise would invalidate so much? It would nullify choices we made, make them wrong, make them stupid. Without that something real underneath it, we wouldn't have had any reason to stay as long as we did. No reason to try as hard.

I wonder if others clung to that "somehow, this comes from love" idea. I did. I wonder how long others told themselves, knew somehow, that there was love there, despite everything. I wonder how long it took others to realize that wasn't enough.

Through everything — through the years of wondering why I wasn't happier, the wishing for something different, the wondering if things were ever going to change — the question of whether or not Jake loved me never occurred to me. Instead, it came down to the manifestation. It came down to commitment. It came down to, eventually, him saying, "I love you, but I love this job more. And that's what I'm choosing."

I wonder too if, in the end, it matters at all. Does it matter that he loved me? We were still unhappy. I still broke into a thousand pieces. I'm still in the process of putting that back together. Would it, could it, have been any harder than it was?

Do the semantics matter, when it still ends the same way?

"Can it be love, when the person doesn't understand you and isn't interested in noticing what you care about?"

This was a comment on my Post-Divorce Jewelry column. What a good question. I've been thinking about it since it posted.

Here's what I've concluded: I think it can.

But here's what else I think: Love isn't enough. We need more than that, if we're going to make it.

I mean, when you think about it, love — just love, by itself — doesn't do a lot. It's nice, yeah. But it doesn't sit up with you when you've had a nightmare. It doesn't call to check in when you've had a hard day. It doesn't remember your birthday. It doesn't learn how to bake something you've mentioned you like.

Love makes us want to do these things, sure. But there's something else — something like consideration, and friendship, and learning not being selfish.  Loving someone makes us want to do these things, maybe.

But it's that something else that makes it actually happen. That something else that makes it keep on happening, once you're past that first giddy phase, once you've settled into a bit of a groove, once you're at the point where you actually know who each other really are.

Maybe it's semantics. Maybe it's just a different, deeper, more real kind of love that makes all that happen. Maybe I'm right and it's a combination of things, and it's love that kind of cements it all together.

I do think Jake and I loved each other. I don't think that stopped. But, in the end, it wasn't enough.