I couldn’t seem to get anything right relationship-wise. Like everything in my life, I wanted to put love and relationships into a predictable project plan. I’d feel so much more in control if I could do that, but love and work are two very different things, and relationships didn’t behave how I intended.
I always saw myself becoming that woman in her mid-to-late thirties with two kids and a career she loved, sharing everything with the man of her dreams. We would go on vacations twice a year, and, if we could afford it, we would send our kids to private school. I would become a soccer mom and consider quitting my job and starting my own consulting company. Eventually, I’d have enough people on staff that I would be able to dictate my own schedule and still have time to volunteer for the school auction.
For the vision to become a reality, I needed to have my first child no later than thirty-five. That annoying biological clock really started ticking loudly this year. Soon I’ll be saying goodbye to my twenties and the idea of turning thirty with no man or even any potential prospects was freaking me out. It would take nine months to carry a baby. Even before that, everyone knew it took six to twelve months to allow your body’s hormones to regulate after getting off the pill so you could get pregnant. Of course, you also wanted a year, minimum, to be just you and your husband as newlyweds before adding the stress of a new baby. Now this assumed you had someone, preferably your husband, to get pregnant with. This meant that I would need to get married before I was thirty-three. If a wedding were going to be everything I dreamed it would be, it required at least a one year engagement. And, if fate should have it and I found the right man, the average dating period prior to engagement was usually a couple of years. That meant if I had any hope of keeping to my schedule, I needed to meet someone before I turned thirty and that someone needed to be “the one.”
It was all so exhausting to think about.
Being the nerd that I am sometimes, I outlined this chart yesterday to remind me that I was soon going to fall behind schedule. I posted it temporarily on my refrigerator.
I turn thirty in ten months and it’s not looking too good on the husband front. And even if I were to meet someone, the odds that he would be the man of my dreams have got to be less than one percent. One percent! What a depressing thought. No wonder I focused so much on my career. If I was being tracked on my relationship performance, I would never be rehired for new opportunities.
All things considered, I thought of myself as a healthy, well-adjusted person. I’m still in my twenties, I own my own condo, and I’m moving up the corporate ladder at a satisfactory pace. I had a great career, working for one of the most sought after companies in the world, and I was earning a six-figure salary. I didn’t think I was bad looking and some people might think I was even pretty. I’m 5’5” and petite, I kept fit by running and not eating junk food, I had long, thick, dark brown hair that fell just past by shoulders and brown eyes, I had good skin, and I had a good personality … I considered myself an attractive, smart, fun, mentally stable, successful woman.
So why couldn’t I find the right guy?
Or in my case, why couldn’t I keep the guy interested? I was afraid of becoming that woman you meet at parties or family gatherings where everyone says, “Why is a pretty and smart girl like you still single and not settled down?”
Why did people ask that, anyway? It’s not like single women chose to be in this position. Did they think that asking us that pointless question would somehow make us feel better? Didn’t they realize that I was wondering the same thing about myself already? People always had a little bit of pity reflected in their eyes and just a hint of sympathy in their voices when they asked about my love life—it always made me feel so good about myself that I wanted to eat another piece of cake before heading home. Alone. Regardless of how smart and pretty I was.
If everything I observed about myself was true, the only reasonable conclusion to my constant singledom was that there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was one of those women who just didn’t see the obvious in themselves. I didn’t know what that was, though. Time and time again, I was unlucky in love, and I don’t think it was because I alphabetized my cereal boxes or because I snored sometimes when my allergies were bad. Success in matters of the heart was my Achilles heel. For someone who was always in control of her life on so many other levels, I couldn’t seem to control the one thing that I really wanted.
Love.
Anna and I were fraternal twins. Even though we looked different, growing up, people tended to lump us into a single identity, “the twins,” and often forgot which name belonged to whom. Since twins occurred in only three percent of natural births, and especially less when we were young, being a twin gave us some minor local notoriety. Because of this, Anna and I learned at a very early age that our relationship was different than the sibling relationships our friends had.