I thought I saw her face — and I whispered, ‘Are you proud of me?’

The woman was tall and strikingly beautiful. There was something about her that made her stand out in a loud restaurant that was packed almost shoulder to shoulder late Friday night. Then she turned her face toward me.

I gasped, at least inwardly. Was that her? It was her, but it couldn’t be. The restaurant was so loud and packed that nobody could have heard me, but I felt my lips move involuntarily.

“Are you proud of me?” I whispered.

For a brief moment, our eyes met. She was beautiful. She had a powerful presence. But it wasn’t her.

She was leaving through one door and I was heading out the door on the other side of the place. Then she was gone and I was in my car. I put the key into the ignition, but I didn’t start the car. I just sat there thinking about what had just happened.

I had thought for a moment that she was someone who I once loved. I was mistaken, but just thinking it was her made me realize — because of the question I blurted out — that I still want her to be proud of me. Even after all these years.

I feel as though my life has been stuck on a very long detour since about 2008. Or was it 2009? I’ve lost track.

In some ways, most of my adult life has been a series of detours. Regardless what came before, though, the last 15 years stand out as time spent wandering in metaphorical wilderness. It hasn’t been 40 years — and I haven’t entered my Promised Land — but it’s been a long and slow climb out of the worst part of my life.

After a romantic relationship failed — for complicated reasons that no longer matter — I entered a period of depression. I was already getting out of political consulting, but the depression left me unable to figure out what to do next. And I floundered.

Over the next few years, I spent all the money I had left from my high-income years in politics. I ended up broke. I had no family. I had no prospects of a family or a new career. The goals that I still had seemed like pie in the sky for someone who was as lost as I’d become.

In 2014, I thought I’d found a reason to live — so to speak — and I thought things were heading in the right direction. But that was a dead end, too, and I ended up lower than ever.

In the decade since then, I’ve started from scratch. I bought a cheap house that I was embarrassed to live in. I took a job — at a college — that I honestly felt was beneath me. But given how far I’d allowed myself to slide, I had to start somewhere.

And for 10 years, I’ve worked steadily to slowly dig my way out of the hole into which I’d fallen.

I’m slowly improving the house that embarrassed me. It’s still not a place where I’d be proud to show off to a potential wife, but I can see how it might finally get there in the next year or so.

My income still isn’t what it was when I worked in politics. Back then, I made better than six figures a year — and much more than that some years. I’m running a small real estate company as a broker now, so I’m doing decently.

For the first time in a long time, I’m starting to see myself as having something to offer to a woman of the caliber who I tend to fall for. There’s nobody who interests me right now, but for the first time in a long time, I would feel as though I had a potential life to offer to the right woman.

And I’ve been realizing lately that I’m proud of myself for all these things. Tonight, I realized that I want a woman to be proud of me for these things, too.

I don’t know why I felt that way when I thought I saw this particular woman. I’m not sure if this experience was really about her or if the memory of her love was a stand-in for a love who I’d like to have today. I’m not sure it matters to answer that right now.

I’m not holding onto the hope of renewed love from someone in the past. This isn’t limerence. This is something that men have experienced for as long as men and women have wanted one another and chosen someone else with whom to build families.

A man wants to do good things with his life. He wants to be productive. He wants to solve problems. He wants to fix things in his life. He wants to build a life that is worthy of attracting the sort of woman he might love. He wants to be worthy of attracting a good woman.

There was a time — when I was quite young — that I was arrogant enough to believe my talent and intelligence were impressive enough that anybody would be lucky to have me. I mostly felt that way professionally, but even when it came to my personal life, I was convinced that my potential was so impressive that anybody would see how far I might go.

Today, my aims are lower. My goals are more short-term and more concrete. I’d still like to do some much bigger things, but if those never happen, I’m OK with that.

I just want to keep building a life that a woman would be proud of — something that would make the right woman say, “I can see a real future with this man.”

I don’t know who that woman might be. I just know that I want to keep slowly rebuilding my life — to the point that the right woman is soon going to see me and see what I’ve done. And she’s going to be impressed in some little way. Then she’s going to get to know me more closely and she’s going to decide she’s proud of me. In time, she might even decide she wants to be my wife.

And that’s what I think it really meant tonight when I involuntarily asked whether this woman — this abstract woman who wasn’t really there — was proud of me.

I don’t know who she is. I just know that I’m eager for the day when the right woman will be proud of me — proud enough to choose me as the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with.