I just read another dopey article claiming that married people have the best sex lives. How it's so great knowing all the person's buttons, the freedom in having just one partner, yada, yada yada.

I beg to differ. I speak from a long lack of experiences during my marriage and unless my friends — both men and women — are all lying to me, we were all to some extent in the same boat.

Take my beleagured friend D, who had the ill-fated date with me that stormy November night (check out my first post). He returned to home and hearth, willing to give his marriage another go.

"There is peace in the family and I have buried the hatchet, swallowed my miseries and decided to hang in there," he wrote me. "After looking at all the alternatives and the reaction of the brood to my breakout suggestions, I've just hunkered down. If I were in France, I would probably have found myself a mistress and lead a double life. But I'm in Norway, so I live a quiet Calvinistic life of middle class mediocrity."

Yikes.

Compare that with my randy neighbor, S, who left her husband and our quiet rural suburb and moved to a condo complex in a nearby town that had a rep of attracting lots of new divorcees. After a few months she confided, "In our neighborhood if you heard screaming, you assumed people are fighting. But here, when you hear screaming, you assume people are having really great sex." 

Or my friend P, who reunited quite literally with a former squeeze after years languishing in a sexless marriage. "It was like finding the magic lamp and getting my three wishes: sex, sex, and more sex!"

I knew from the get-go that Rebound Man was just that; not Mr. Right, but a perfect Mr. Right Now. A gentle reintroduction to the self I lost in marriage. You have to start somewhere.

The first kiss was just a gentle brushing of lips, the slightest embrace. But oh so nice.

“Could I have another one, please,” I asked.

A slow smile. The mutual acquiescence.

“If we keep this up, I won’t be able to walk out of here,” he said.

“What? It was just a kiss.”

“A kiss with intent to seduce. That constitutes sex in the first degree.”

Oh My Lord! Here I’d thought I’d lost my libido — turns out I was just looking for it in the wrong place!

In the beginning, being with Rebound Man was like opening a gift and finding exactly what I had hoped for. I loved regressing back to that state of inarticulate adolescence, nearly swooning from the sheer delight of fresh infatuation. Which is always my favorite part, before the hard work of a relationship.

But the rebound relationship is meant to be light, insubstantial, fun — like cotton candy. It has no nutritional value, and is fine in limited amounts, just enough to leave that sweet taste on your lips. It’s when you overindulge or try to take it seriously that you get into trouble: dip in, dip out, move on, be happy.

Not that I practice what I preach — even new habits can be hard to break. So I hung onto my rebound way past its expiration date, finally accepting that this relationship was just as lacking as my marriage had been. He too, could only offer just one piece of the puzzle, nothing more. Time to find a new game.

But it sure was fun while it lasted.

Fast forward a few months. Ex had found a lovely new substitute for me, a recent divorcee who graciously took on my former roles as hostess, gardener, and short order cook for the kids. Okay, I'm lying. There was nothing lovely about this woman.

She was a sociopath and gold digger and I hated every minute that my girls were exposed to her, but let's not quibble over semantics. With Ex occupied, I thought I might be free to try dating again without former spousal interference.

R was a natural choice. He was sexy, single, and we'd been friends for years. It seemed inevitable that we would eventually connect. And we were very discreet. Ex and I had vowed to keep our children out of our personal lives and I figured at least I should try to live up to my end of the bargain.

But it seems we weren't discreet enough. R called one morning to tell me he just received a disturbing phone call. "I've put two and two together," Ex had blustered. "You are dating my wife! Don't try and hide it — I've had my suspicions validated by someone close to the situation." (Yes, he really talks like that. Reason 895 why I had to leave him.)

R was understandably confused. He responded: "I asked you months ago if it would be okay for me to ask Nancy out and you said yes."

"Well, going out on a date and dating are two different things," Ex countered primly.

My wife? Asking permission? Didn't the separation agreement and subsequent divorce decree allow for eventual dating? Since when do exes morph into father substitutes? And did Ex really think that one date with me would be such a snore that a second was out of the question?

An old college roommate emailed me a notice about another classmate from our college alumni magazine. "Wasn't he a friend of yours?" she asked. "He certainly has done well for himself."

He was and he had. He had been the copy editor on our college yearbook; I had been editor in chief. We had been great pals, talking into the night over endless pitchers of beer, but had never gone beyond that. Which is pretty impressive for the 70s, I have to admit. I dashed off a quick email to say hello and was delighted 20 minutes later when I got a response: "Holy shit! I've always wondered where you were."

And so began a lovely email relationship. We talked about our college friendship, how he had always hoped it had been more. (Who knew?) We spoke of our failed marriages, our careers, where we were going.

After three months of increasingly, um, interesting correspondence, I decided it was time to quit pussyfooting around. A visit to the aforementioned roommate outside Washington DC was in order. That she just so happened to live a few miles from him — pure coincidence.

We met. He had aged really well, in a craggy Clint Eastwood way (more Fistful of Dollars than Million Dollar Baby). And as our lunch date stretched into the evening hours, it was clear we still had a lot to talk about.

We started to make plans to see each other again. He was definitely coming to visit in a couple of weeks.

But then he had to meet with his publisher about some changes to his next book.

And then there was the sailing competition he was in.

Then some nonsense about having to visit his sister.

I made the mistake of believing in what might be possible.

"Try Match.com," my divorced friends suggested. I was skeptical. I had tried the original computer dating back in college — only for the story, mind you, not to find dates — and hadn't been much impressed — with the story I ultimately wrote or the dates. The ensuing decades had done nothing to change my mind.

Call me picky, but I just couldn't quiet my inner writer when reading the profiles. Is there anyone who doesn't like romantic dinners and walks on the beach at sunset? Besides, my computer was too slow. By the time I downloaded the pictures, the profiles had totally turned me off.

But nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I tiptoed into Internet dating and created a semi-profile on Match.com (Nerve.com creeped me out too much — their sexual position of the day feature gave me the sense that this wasn't the place to find my true soul mate). Besides, I wasn't really looking for a date...but I wouldn't complain if I happened to find one.

And I did get some hits almost immediately, which progressed in short order to phone calls. And what I heard wasn't good.

One man told me he agreed to meet a girl without seeing her picture first and it turned out she was more like size 14 (not four as she claimed to be) and after five minutes of conversation told him she felt comfortable enough to tell him her secrets such as"...tried to kill myself at college...twice." Next!

Another man shared that he had been intrigued with a woman's picture and email exchanges enough to want to meet her in person. But instead of the recent law graduate he was expecting, waiting for him at their designated meeting place, was her mother, hobbling in on a cane. "But I looked just like my daughter when I was her age," was her reasoning behind posting her daughter's picture rather than her own.

Really — people lie about their weight and age?

After years of being unhappily married, I took the leap of faith that my life would be better after divorce. Granted, I had some experience with being on my own — my Ex was so AWOL in the last five years of our marriage that my friends joked that I already was a single mom, albeit one without money problems.

With the help of a bevy of best friends, I had made a lovely (though somewhat lonely) life for myself with my three daughters.

But now, with the separation agreement in hand and one half of my bed empty, came the big question: after 15 years of marriage, how does a middle-aged suburban mom start dating again?

After all, my last real “first date” was in 1984. 1984? The title of the Orwell book on how Big Brother was watching our every move? A coincidence or harbinger of things to come?

It wasn’t that I didn’t know lots of good-looking, kind-hearted single guys who were completely crazy about me. Yes, I swear it’s true, even as isolated as I am, way up in the northern reaches of New York. Of course, these are the guys I meet each morning at the elementary school bus stop, leaving me in a bit of a pickle.

“Promise me you’ll never go out with one of my teachers,” my teenage daughter implored, with just a hint of panic in her voice. No problem there, I assured her. (Truth be told, most of them seemed young enough to be my own kids had I started this baby-making business a decade earlier.)

Going out with platonic friends seemed to be the best place to start, at least to get me familiar with dating protocol in this century.

So, when a former neighbor was back in town for a visit, and emailed me, we agreed to meet for dinner. Ex had the kids that night, so that wasn’t a problem.

Or so I thought.