If you’ve been here since Part One, you already know the question. It’s the one that comes from strangers at parties, from the checkout line, from men who hear “husband number five” and think it’s an invitation.
“Are you OKAY?”
“How does that even HAPPEN?”
“Can’t turn a hoe into a housewife!” (Still the crowd favorite. Still, always, a man.)
Back in Part One I told you I keep an arsenal for these people — the wouldn’t you like to know, the we don’t even play in the same arenas, the you can’t turn a felon, cheater or liar into a King line I am still, to this day, very proud of. And I use them. Every one. Usually followed by the mom death stare that says I wish you would.
But seven posts later, I owe you the truth I was too busy being funny to say out loud:
For a long time, I wasn’t okay. And the reason had almost nothing to do with the men.
Here’s what I can see now that I couldn’t see at seventeen — laid out on the hood of a red Mustang under a cloudless New Mexico sky, saying yes to a boy who was about to disappear.
I wasn’t chasing men. I was chasing a feeling.
I told you about it in Part One. Accomplishment. Security. Hope. The feeling of finally fitting the belief system I was raised inside. The feeling of belonging. I felt it the first time Ryan asked, and I spent the next twenty years convinced it lived inside a proposal — that if I could just get the ring, the vows, the name-change I never actually did, I would finally be acceptable. Finally be enough. Finally belong.
So I said yes. Again. And again. I married the feeling five times, and every time it wore off, I did not think maybe the feeling was the problem. I thought maybe the man was. Sometimes I was right — some of them earned that felon-cheater-liar line honestly. But sometimes the only thing wrong was that a wedding cannot do the one job I kept hiring it for.
No one can hand you a belonging you haven’t built yourself.
It cost me four weddings to learn that sentence.
In Part One I gave you my three reasons. Nature — a biological mother married five times, maybe seven. A strict, shame-soaked house that taught me every relationship had to be ACCEPTABLE. And parents whose marriage I loved so much I got obsessed with having one of my own. I handed them over almost like excuses. A tidy explanation for a messy résumé.
They weren’t excuses. I understand them differently now.
They were the map. Not of where I went wrong — of how I got lost. And you cannot find your way home until you’re willing to look honestly at the roads that took you out of it.
In my last post, I wrote about the statistic nobody wants to sit with: that women file for the overwhelming majority of divorces. I gave you the data, and the part the data leaves out. Let me say it one more time, because it’s the whole reason I wrote any of this:
Women don’t leave because we’re flighty, or cold, or impossible to satisfy. We leave because we spent years being the only one holding the whole thing up, and one day we finally do the math on what it’s costing us to stay.
Leaving was never the failure. Staying as long as we did was the miracle.
So if you’re reading this as one of us — if you’ve got your own number, your own arsenal, your own version of the man at the party asking if you’re OKAY — hear me:
You are not a cautionary tale. You are not damaged goods. You are not can’t turn a hoe into a housewife. You are a woman who kept believing love was possible even after it kept lying to you, and I do not know a braver thing than that.
YOU ARE BRAVE.
It’s not all men who need to hear it. But it is always a man who makes us doubt it.
Which brings me to number five. You already know how this one ends — but I don’t get to write a finale without him.
I loved him when I was eight years old.
I wrote his name in my diary — you’ve seen the page.
Life took me on a twenty-year detour through five weddings, three kids, and enough material for a Netflix limited series before it finally set me back down in front of the diary boy.
And here is the thing I most need you to understand, because it’s the whole point:
Joshua didn’t save me. By the time I got to him, I’d stopped needing saving. I had finally built the belonging myself — the one I’d been trying to marry my way into since I was seventeen.
He didn’t complete me.
He met me.
There is a universe of difference between those two words, and it took me my entire life to feel it.
My dad still jokes that my whole life was “the unending hunt for the future ex-Mr. Loyd.” And he’s not wrong that I hunted. But I want to point out the thing hiding inside his own punchline — I never once changed my name.
Through all five, I stayed Loyd. At the time I told everyone it was easier for the paperwork. The truth is I was keeping the one piece of myself I refused to hand over. Some quiet, stubborn part of me knew — long before the rest of me caught up — that whoever I was becoming, I had to still be there at the end of it.
I’m still here. Still Loyd. And for the first and final time: not hunting.
So. The neat little bow, since I promised you one at the very start of all this:
I don’t regret a single wedding. Not the ones that ended in a courtroom. Not the ones that ended in a lie. Every one of them was a stone I stepped on to get across the river, and I would not be standing where I’m standing — loved, known, done chasing — if I’d skipped even one.
Five times a bride. Once a wife.
If a stranger asks me now how I became a woman who married five men, I finally have the real answer. It isn’t a clapback.
It’s this: I kept looking for somewhere to belong, until I understood I was the place.
I have always been enough.
And then I married the boy from the diary.
— Moe
Seven parts. One love story. Complete.
New here? Start from Part One — it’s a wild ride, and I promise it all comes back around.
Don’t be shy — come find me in the comments, especially if you’ve got your own number. I’ll show you mine. And God knows if we met in public, I’d be insisting on getting your phone number.