It was almost seven years ago that I took a chance and drove from Manhattan to Glen Ridge, NJ one Sunday morning.  It was about a 45-minute drive for me, and an hour and half for Chris, who lived in Pennsylvania and was visiting friends.  As we got to know each other over breakfast, the normal questions of kids, divorce, exes and schedules came up.  As I sheepishly explained to Chris that my kids lived with me almost all of the time and that their father came into my home a few nights a week to be with them, his eyes met mine with understanding and relief, not the normal confusion or disbelief of others I had tried to explain this to.  He then confessed that he too had this arrangement with his ex wife and spent weekends in his old home, sleeping in the basement guest room.

Thus began our courtship, enabled in part by our mutual understanding of what our nesting arrangements meant to us, to our kids (even if they did not know it) and to our relationships with our exes.  And over that time, we have worked to support each other in our parallel nesting lives, dealing with the curiosity and sometimes scorn of non-nesting divorcees, and nurturing our own relationship as it morphed and nudged its way into our nesting worlds.