Looking For A Husband – Chapter 1 – The Bet

I want to be clear that the whole thing was Diane’s fault.

Not the marriage – I’ll take credit for that one. But the bet, the list, the three months of increasingly unhinged husband-hunting that preceded the marriage? Diane. Specifically Diane on her third glass of wine, sitting cross-legged on Maya’s couch with the specific energy of a woman who has recently become engaged and has therefore decided that everyone around her should also be paired off, ideally immediately.

It was a Friday night at Maya’s place, which meant the usual situation – too much food, a card game that nobody finished, at least one conversation that started reasonably and ended somewhere nobody planned. There were six of us. Maya and her boyfriend Drew, who had been together so long they finished each other’s grocery lists. Diane and her new fiancé Pete, still in the honeymoon phase where everything was we and us and our and the rest of us were quietly waiting for it to settle. Carla, who had broken up with someone three months prior and was in the aggressively happy single phase, the one where you redecorate your apartment and take a solo trip and tell everyone you’ve never felt more like yourself, which was probably true.

And me.

Rachel. Thirty-two. Salon owner. Never married, not currently dating anyone specific, in possession of a full life and an apparently suspicious absence of romantic catastrophe to report.

That last part was apparently the problem.

It started the way these things always start – sideways, over snacks, disguised as a normal conversation.

We’d finished dinner and moved to the living room, and Drew had pulled out a card game that required you to answer personal questions, which in retrospect was the first warning sign. Those games exist for one purpose, which is to extract information from people who would not volunteer it under normal circumstances.

The question that landed on me was: What’s the one thing missing from your life right now?

The table looked at me.

I looked at the table.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m good.”

Diane made a sound.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She made the sound again.

“Diane.”

“I just -” She set down her wine. “When’s the last time you went on a date?”

“I go on dates.”

“A real one. With someone you actually liked.”

I thought about it. Tried to think of a specific name, a specific evening, the specific feeling of sitting across from someone and thinking yes, this, more of this. Came up mostly empty, which was not the answer I was looking for.

“I’ve been busy,” I said.

“You’re always busy,” Maya said, not unkindly. “That’s not the same thing.”

“I’m not lonely, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“Nobody said lonely,” Carla said. “We said never been in a real long relationship. Which is a different thing. Which is also true.”

I looked around the room. Five faces, all watching me with the particular expression of people who have been discussing this before tonight and are now simply saying it out loud.

“You’ve talked about this,” I said.

“We talk about everything,” Maya said. “That’s what friends are.”

“Invasive,” I said. “Friends are invasive.”

“We’re concerned,” Diane said.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re great,” she said. “You’re also thirty-two and the last guy you mentioned was the one who talked about his fantasy football team for forty minutes on a first date.”

“He was passionate.”

“Rachel.”

“What?”

“Why do you keep agreeing to go out with guys like that?”

And there it was. The actual question, finally arriving after twenty minutes of approach. I picked up my wine and thought about it honestly, which I didn’t always do on this particular subject.

“Because they ask,” I said.

The room was quiet for a second.

“That’s it?” Carla asked.

“I’m not out there looking,” I said. “Someone asks, seems normal enough, I go. It’s not a big operation.”

“That’s the problem,” Diane said. “You’ve never actually looked. You just – accept whatever shows up.”

“I’ve been building a business.”

“For how long?”

“Four years.”

“And before that?”

“College. And before that the family store, which -“

“Rachel.” Maya leaned forward. “When have you ever, in your adult life, actively gone looking for a person you wanted to be with?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

The card game sat in the middle of the coffee table, forgotten entirely.

“That’s what I thought,” Diane said, and she didn’t say it mean – she said it the way you say something true that you’ve been holding for a while. “You know how to go after everything else. The salon, the loan, the whole damn business plan. You just never went after this.”

“Because you can’t make a business plan for a relationship,” I said.

“Why not?”

I laughed. “Because that’s insane.”

“Is it?” Diane tilted her head. “You knew what you wanted in a business. You wrote it down. You went and got it. Why is this different?”

“Because people aren’t – “

“Three months,” she said.

I stopped. “What?”

“Three months.” She was sitting up straighter now, the wine giving her the specific courage of a woman who has decided to commit to a bit. “You find someone worth marrying in three months, we all admit we were wrong and you were right and you’ve had it handled this whole time. You don’t – we were right and you were just waiting for things to land in your lap.”

“That is the most ridiculous thing anyone has said in this house.”

“Do you want to take that bet or not?”

The room had gone the specific quiet of people watching something unfold that they are absolutely not going to interrupt. Drew was eating chips with the careful stillness of a man who understands when to be invisible. Carla was watching me the way you watch a car approach a speed bump faster than recommended.

I should have said no.

I should have laughed it off, redirected to the card game, let the wine and the evening carry us somewhere else entirely. I was a grown woman. I ran a business. I did not make life decisions based on bets made on a Friday night with a glass and a half in me.

I looked at Diane.

“Fine,” I said.

“Fine?”

“Three months.” I picked up my wine. “I’ll find a husband in three months.”

The room erupted.

Maya grabbed my arm. “Rachel -“

“I said what I said.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m always serious.” I drained the glass. “I just never apply it in this direction. Consider it applied.”

Diane was already grinning, the grin of a woman who has gotten exactly what she came for. “Rules,” she said. “Has to be someone you’d actually marry. Not just date. Not just tolerate. The real thing.”

“Obviously.”

“And we get to know who you’re seeing. Group chat updates.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Rachel.”

“Fine. Limited updates. Edited for my dignity.”

“Deal.” She extended her hand across the coffee table. We shook on it like we were closing a business deal, which in a way we were, which should have told me something about how the next three months were going to go.

Drew ate another chip.

Carla refilled everyone’s wine.

Maya looked at me with the expression of a woman who loves me completely and thinks I have just made a significant error in judgment.

She was not entirely wrong.

I got home at midnight with the pleasant weight of a good evening in my chest and the less pleasant weight of a commitment I had not planned on making when I woke up that morning.

I stood in my kitchen and replayed the conversation with the specific clarity that arrives after the wine starts wearing off and the decisions you made in its presence begin to look their actual size.

Three months. Find a husband. Real one. Group chat updates.

I poured a glass of water and stood at the counter and thought: what have you done, Rachel.

Then I thought: no, wait.

I thought about what Diane had said. You know how to go after everything else. The loan application I’d written and rewritten for six weeks before I walked into that bank and did not leave until they said yes. The clients I’d built from nothing, one referral at a time. The salon I’d opened with secondhand chairs and a logo I designed myself at midnight and a conviction that I knew what I was doing even when I mostly didn’t.

I’d gone after all of it. Every bit.

I’d never once gone after this.

Why is this different?

I set down the glass.

It wasn’t different. That was the thing. It was the same problem I’d solved a dozen times in a dozen other forms – you identify what you want, you make a plan, you execute the plan, you don’t stop until it works.

I had not been making a plan. I’d been accepting inventory.

Those were not the same thing.

I went to bed thinking about it.

Woke up thinking about it more.

The group chat started at seven-fifteen in the morning.

I was horizontal, one eye open, phone in hand, watching the messages come in.

GAME ON – Diane, with three fire emojis.

I can’t believe she said yes – Maya.

I absolutely can – Carla.

Is she awake yet?  – Diane.

Rachel are you awake? – Diane.

RACHEL – Diane.

I typed: I’m awake. I meant what I said. Give me today.

Three dots from Diane. Then: For what?

I put the phone face-down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling.

For the plan, I thought. Give me today for the plan.

Because if I was going to do this – and apparently I was, apparently that was a thing I had agreed to, in front of witnesses, with a handshake – I was going to do it right. I was going to do it like I did everything else.

From the beginning. With a list.