Theresa Thorson has been married four times, and she doesn't talk about that with embarrassment or apology. Nor does she divide the men neatly into successes and failures, the good choices and the bad ones. She has lived too long, and thought too much about her own life, to make it quite that simple.

“Every single one of the guys I married was wonderful,” she says, “and what I needed at the time.”

The last part matters.

What Theresa needed at twenty was not necessarily what she needed at thirty-five or fifty. The men changed, certainly, but so did she.

Her first husband, Jerry, came into her life when she was young. She had known him since her teenage years, and when the time came to decide where one relationship might lead, Theresa remembers seeing two very different possibilities in front of her. One man was exciting and unpredictable. Jerry was safe.

She chose safe.

There was nothing wrong with Jerry. Theresa still describes him as a very nice man. They married and stayed married for about twelve years. For a younger Theresa, the relationship provided something she wanted then: stability and a dependable beginning to adult life.

But Theresa was never particularly well suited to standing still.

She wanted activity. She wanted ideas. She wanted to be around people who made her think. As the years passed, the qualities that had once made Jerry feel safe began to feel confining. Theresa remembers becoming bored.

She is characteristically unsentimental about admitting it.

“I don't do boring.”

By then, she had built a professional life of her own. She was working with troubled young people, eventually becoming responsible for the girls' program at a residential facility. It was serious work involving children whose lives were complicated, families who needed help, programs that needed money, and staff members trying to figure out what might actually work.

That was where she met Ron.

Ron arrived as an executive director. Theresa, running the girls' program, met with him regularly to discuss what they were doing, what they needed, and where the program should go next.

She was fascinated by the way his mind worked.

Ron could imagine programs before other people recognized the need for them. He could take an idea and turn it into a proposal that funders wanted to support. Theresa remembers him as someone ahead of his time, a man who could see possibilities and then find a way to finance them.

Theresa brought something different.

She knew how to run the programs.

The partnership developed around the work, but it didn't remain there. Theresa fell in love with him while she was still married to Jerry.

She doesn't rewrite that part of her history to make herself look better. She knew what she was doing, and she knows that the transition from one marriage to another was messy. There was drinking during that period as well, something that would take on much greater importance at another time in her life.

But underneath the complications was something Theresa understood about herself.

“The thing that really attracts me to anybody is their mind.”

Ron had one that interested her.

Together they became more than husband and wife. They were professional partners. Ron could see the program that ought to exist and find the money to make it possible. Theresa could take the idea and turn it into something that worked for the young people they were trying to help.

For a woman who had discovered that safety alone wasn't enough, Ron offered something different.

He gave her someone to think with.

They were together for roughly another dozen years. Eventually Ron retired, and Theresa retired early as well. He was fourteen years older, and she wanted them to have time together while they could.

They did.

Then Ron died.

Theresa grieved him. But grief, for Theresa, has never meant deciding that the rest of her own life is over.

Eventually she started looking again.

And Theresa being Theresa, she did not approach the search casually.

She went on the Internet.

She found the dating sites that didn't cost anything and began meeting men. Lots of them.

Theresa estimates that she met about 150.

She developed a system.

Sometimes she arranged several meetings at the same restaurant, one after another. She would sit with a cup of coffee and give each man about an hour and a half to reveal whether there was anything there worth pursuing.

Sometimes, she admits, it didn't take an hour and a half.

At one restaurant, a woman who worked there finally asked what Theresa was doing.

“I'm dating,” Theresa told her. “I'm trying to figure out if I like these guys.”

The location didn't matter much. Theresa conducted some of her interviews at Burger King.

She wasn't looking for elegance.

She was looking for a mind.

Out of all those men, only one really interested her.

His name was Richard.

Richard was living in Portland when they met. He had become involved in a project cataloging the work of an artist, helping organize paintings so they could be documented and eventually sold. Theresa, who has never been particularly good at standing nearby while something needs organizing, began helping him with the project.

Eventually Richard moved to Redmond with Theresa, where they lived with her mother for a time. Theresa remembers that Richard and her mother occasionally clashed because both preferred being in charge. She can laugh about that now.

What mattered more was that Richard was intelligent and involved in the world around him. He cared about his community and about helping people.

That fit Theresa.

Once again, she had found someone appropriate for the person she was at that point in her life.

Their years together included travel, family and community. Theresa encouraged Richard to take care of himself, not by ordering him to change, but by telling him why it mattered to her.

“I want you to be around for a long time,” she told him. “I'm really invested in the relationship that we have.”

The decision, she made clear, was his.

That distinction runs through much of Theresa's life. She can be forceful. She can have very definite opinions about what someone ought to do. But underneath that is her stubborn belief that people ultimately have to make their own choices.

Richard did.

They had their years together.

Then Richard died too.

Three husbands. Three relationships of roughly a dozen years each. Three men who entered Theresa's life at different times and gave her different things.

It would be easy to look backward and ask which one was the right man.

Theresa doesn't seem particularly interested in the question.

Jerry had been right for the young woman who wanted something safe.

Ron had arrived when Theresa was building a career and discovering how important intellectual partnership was to her.

Richard came when she was older and wanted companionship with someone intelligent, engaged and interested in the world beyond himself.

None of that means the relationships were perfect. Theresa doesn't claim they were. Her own choices weren't always perfect either, and she doesn't claim that.

She simply refuses to judge an entire relationship by the fact that it changed or ended.

People sometimes speak of finding the one person they were meant to spend their lives with.

Theresa's life suggests another possibility.

Perhaps there can be more than one right person.

Perhaps the person who fits one chapter of a life would not have fit another. Perhaps we change enough over the years that what we need from love changes with us.

Theresa certainly did.

After Richard died, she was alone again.

She would eventually find another man.

But not yet.

There was something Theresa needed to find first.

This time, it wasn't a man.

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