I’d met Harrison.
I grabbed the planner and got back into bed where I turned the pages to the very last one. I knew precisely where it was. My Future Husband Checklist. I’d written it in grad school, but had transferred it to this particular planner after meeting Harrison and deciding that he might be the one. He had to match all of the items, I’d told myself. And he did. That was something else my college shrink had told me. “Look for someone who has the same attributes that you do. It’s not too much to ask that your partner have the same level of success as you. If you write a list of what you’re looking for and stick to it, you’re sure to find the perfect mate.”
She was right, and stick to it I had. Through all these years. My gaze scanned the familiar words. I rubbed my thumb across them and smiled.
Gainfully employed with no history of being fired or quitting often (flaky) or similar.
Intelligent. Master’s degree or higher. (Ph.D. preferred.)
Organized. Clean. Well-kept. Pays bills on time. Not a hoarder. No trash sitting around living space and/or car.
Not a gambler. Doesn’t even play cards recreationally. (except for whist at JA Festival, obvi)
Funny (because of course).
Growth-oriented and shares my vision for the future. Kids, etc.
Has never cheated on anyone in the past, i.e., trustworthy.
Attractive (to me). Doesn’t have to be any better-looking a man than I am a woman, but both of us must feel physical attraction on some level. (Must have good teeth too.)
Kind. Not rude to waiters, etc.
Shares my values. No religious zealots or anti-feminists.
Harrison met every single one of those criteria. Not just most of them. All of them. Thanks to my list, I’d known he was right for me from the start.
He was an unabashed nerd like I was. We could talk for hours about the proper use of an eyeglass and the mourning rituals of the early-nineteenth-century English. I’d never met a man who knew as much about the things I loved as he did. At least no eligible men my age. It turned out Harrison hadn’t had many girlfriends either. A lot of his friends in high school had just assumed he was gay. He said his mother had even asked him a time or two. He wasn’t gay, though he did know how to tie a cravat and dance a waltz. But he also knew all the details about the battle of Waterloo and way too much about both the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Nelson. What wasn’t hot about that?
With his permission, I even checked out Harrison’s credit score, and it was higher than mine. Impressive. He was funny. The man could do a Napoleon impression that had our grad students (and me) in stitches. Harrison was committed, healthy, and had never played poker in his life. He’d also never been to Las Vegas, which is where my dad, the “artist,” had ended up, perhaps inevitably. Dad claimed the art scene there was great for rich buyers, but Luke and I knew the real reason he was there. Anyone who knew him did. Harrison was nothing like my dad. Perfect husband material.
I scanned the list again. The gainfully employed thing was a result of my dad having a string of jobs he’d been fired from. He preferred to paint, which never earned him much. Harrison was not only gainfully employed, he was employed in my same profession. We could empathize with each other on a level many couples couldn’t. I couldn’t love anyone who didn’t value education. Not only was it important to me, but it was my job.
I’d grown up in a trailer park with a mother who should have gone to college but had ‘accidentally’ gotten pregnant instead. She’d had to wait tables and spend her spare time in the library. Both of my parents had told me since I was a kid that I would go to college, but I had been the one to want to go all the way. Getting a Ph.D. had been important to me since I was a kid. To me it symbolized being smart, something not often associated with kids from my trailer park. The day my new fourth grade teacher had looked at my address on the orientation paperwork and said she wasn’t sure if I was on a “college track,” I vowed to myself that not only would I be on a college track, I would blow her and