Looking For A Husband – Chapter 2 – The List

The hangover arrived at nine.

Not a catastrophic one – I knew my limits well enough to stay inside them, mostly – but the specific low-grade variety that sits behind your eyes and makes everything slightly louder than it needs to be. The group chat, for example. Which had accumulated forty-seven messages between seven-fifteen and nine AM, which was a rate of communication I was not equipped to handle without coffee.

I made the coffee first. Non-negotiable. The salon was closed until ten and I had forty minutes of quiet I intended to use fully before I engaged with anything or anyone.

I stood at my kitchen counter in my robe and drank the first cup in silence and let the morning do what mornings do – settle, clarify, arrange the previous night’s decisions into their actual shapes.

The bet was real. I’d made it in front of five witnesses with a handshake. It was real.

Three months. Find a husband. Not just a date, not just a tolerable human, not just someone who asked and seemed normal enough and got a yes because I had an evening free. The real thing. The person. The one you build a life with and don’t spend the whole time wondering if you should have looked harder.

I poured the second cup.

Opened the group chat.

The most recent message was from Diane, sent four minutes ago: she’s ghost us she already gave up

I typed: I haven’t given up. I’m making a plan.

The response was immediate and loud.

A PLAN – Diane, caps, three exclamation points.

of course she is – Maya, with what I chose to interpret as affection.

this is either genius or insane – Carla.

probably both – Drew, who rarely weighed in on anything but apparently felt this warranted it.

I put the phone down and went to find a notebook.

Here is the thing about plans: they work. That is not a popular opinion in the context of romance, where the prevailing cultural wisdom seems to be that love arrives when you stop looking, that the universe delivers, that you can’t force these things, that it happens when you least expect it – all of which is lovely and also completely useless as a methodology.

I had not built my salon by waiting for the universe.

I had built it by identifying what I needed, writing it down, and going to get it. Systematically. With a notebook.

I found the notebook – one of the nice ones, spiral bound, the kind I used for business notes – and sat down at my kitchen table and opened it to a fresh page and wrote at the top, in my best handwriting:

The List.

Then I sat back and thought about it seriously. Not what I’d been settling for. Not what had been showing up in my inbox and my blind dates and my vaguely disappointing Saturday evenings. What I actually wanted. What would actually work. The non-negotiables.

I wrote for twenty minutes without stopping.

When I was done I looked at what I had.

The List – Working Draft

1. Two to three years older than me. Not a hard rule but a strong preference. I’d dated younger and it felt like babysitting and I didn’t have the energy. I wanted someone who’d lived enough to know what they wanted and wasn’t still figuring out the basics.

2. Taller than me. I was five-six. This was not a tall bar. I just wanted to be able to wear heels without the mental arithmetic.

3. Permanent employment. Not successful, not ambitious, not has a five-year plan – just a job. A real one. That he showed up to consistently and that paid his own bills. I had worked too hard for my own stability to subsidize someone else’s.

4. A hobby that wasn’t me. I’d dated men whose entire personality was the relationship and it was exhausting for both of us. A man needed something he cared about that had nothing to do with me. Hiking, woodworking, cooking, I didn’t care – just something.

5. Gets along with people. Specifically my people. My friends were non-negotiable. They’d been with me through the loan and the launch and the year the salon nearly didn’t make it and the divorce of my best client that became my problem for six months. Anyone I was going to spend my life with needed to be able to sit at Maya’s table and be a person worth having there.

6. No bad habits. Smoking, hard no. Gambling, hard no. The kind of drinking that became a personality, hard no. I wasn’t asking for a monk. I was asking for a functioning adult.

7. I paused here. Tapped my pen. Then wrote:

Hates olives. Likes pineapple on pizza.

I looked at that for a moment.

It was specific. It was arguably insane. But here was my reasoning: I had very strong feelings about olives on pizza, which were that they were wrong and I wouldn’t be convinced otherwise, and I had equally strong feelings about pineapple, which were that it was correct and the haters were operating in bad faith. I had ended a perfectly decent third date early because the man across from me looked at me with genuine disgust when I ordered it and said that’s not real pizza in the tone of a man who’d been waiting to say it.

Life was too short.

Also – and this was the real reason, if I was being honest – if a man hated the same random specific thing I hated and loved the same random specific thing I loved, it was a sign of compatible wiring at a level that no interview question could access. You couldn’t fake olive opinions. They were too deeply held.

I added one more.

8. Likes The Midnight.

The Midnight was a band. Synth-pop, slightly melancholy, genuinely good, the kind of music that sounded like driving at night in a city you love. Nobody I’d ever dated had heard of them. I’d stopped mentioning them as a test because it felt unfair.

It was absolutely a test.

I looked at the completed list.

Seven real items and one about pizza and one about a band. It was not a traditional approach to spouse selection. It was also the most honest document I’d produced in years.

I took a photo of it and sent it to the group chat without comment.

The responses came in over the next ten minutes while I showered.

number 7 is sending me – Carla.

the olive thing is a dealbreaker I respect it – Drew.

this is the most Rachel thing that has ever happened – Maya.

I love her – Diane. Also I already know someone.

I stopped toweling off my hair.

Typed one-handed: Who?

Three dots. Then: come to brunch and I’ll tell you.

Diane.

Sunday. My place. Eleven. Bring the list.

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror – damp hair, robe, hazel eyes slightly squinted with suspicion – and thought: this is either the best decision I’ve ever made or the start of a story I’m going to be telling for the rest of my life.

Both of those things, as it turned out, were true.

I sent one message to the group chat.

Game on.

Then I went to dry my hair, because I was a professional, and Saturdays waited for no one, and I had a business to run before I had a husband to find.

Priorities.