Talk soon,
C.
I receive Colin’s email after my midmorning snack of charcuterie. No, I’m not kidding. I have a gorgeous cheese board that I like to use as often as fiscally possible. I roll up some slices of fresh prosciutto and put out some cubes of cheddar, along with a handful of grapes and a stack ofwater crackers, all purchased at the grocery store yesterday after my writing session. (I was feeling especially fancy when I chose the water crackers. They were on sale, prompting the entire idea, but I got carried away and snack time spiraled into a forty-plus-dollar event. Unfortunately, my bank account is down to $190 now, but I’m sure I can make that last another few weeks. If not, that’s why God invented emergency credit cards. Plus, real talk? It was a spectacular treat.)
I’ve learned from past mistakes that you should never own something as fun as a charcuterie board andsaveit for “special occasions,” because it’s highly likely that the people you saved it for will somehow end up not having been worth it in the long run. Then, you’ll just end up lamenting all the missed opportunities you had to enjoy the thing all by yourself.
My dating history offers great proof of this point. I spent most of college just playing the field after I started seeing this fraternity boy my freshman year named Jack. He went to Boston University, not Boston College, and we met at a BU frat party that me and the girls crashed. It was loud, sweaty, and overflowing with the unique combined scent of grain alcohol punch and Axe body spray. We danced, and it was glorious. I’d never danced like that with a guy before—his junk grinding all up on my junk, the glazed look in his eyes basically screamingI love you. Okay, maybe not. But itwasfun. We started “hanging out,” which I took to mean “going steady” until a few days later when I came to surprise him at his dorm room and a half-naked girl answered the door. She had her hands over her boobs, and he was lying in bed. So, yeah. I learned very quickly that college is maybe not the best place to find a soul mate.
Once college ended, I moved back home and got a job working atBreaking Bronx, a weekly local rag that was distributed at the grocery stores and bodegas in my fine outer borough. I was a restaurant reviewer and was responsible for the “Food n’ Stuff” column, which ranged from testing new recipes to secret shopping in grocery stores. It paid very little,but I was still living at home, so it didn’t really matter. Plus, the beat reporter for sports, Malik Patel-Robinson, wasfine. He was, like, music video hot, and he taught me the term “badunkadunk” at our first staff meeting together. Afterwards, I invited him to come with me to try out a new Caribbean restaurant, and I taught him the difference between Guyanese black pepper chicken and Jamaican jerk chicken. We started hanging out at work all the time, and he became my first real, adult boyfriend. We went to movies together, went out to eat, and got really creative in the sex department (we once did it on the picnic table in his tiny backyard) because we both lived at home with elderly grandmothers in addition to our parents, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that elderly grandmothers are always home. Unfortunately, both of our families were too old-school to accept our relationship as anything other than “cute.” I made the mistake of bringing him over for Christmas, where he met my parents and my nonna. There were so many raised eyebrows, Italian mutterings, and signs of the cross from my grandmother that I told Malik she had dementia, just not to have her seem like such a racist old bat. We broke up when he got a job working for a real newspaper in Manhattan and made enough money to move into his own place.
The next guy I dated had great potential, or so I thought. Luke was sweet and attractive but pretty bland. (A great fit for my grandmother, really.) I met him at a church pancake breakfast that I was covering forBreaking Bronx. The pancakes tasted like cardboard, but Luke was serving them, and I went back for seconds with fake questions in my mind to ask in the name of journalism. He thought I was funny and “sinfully hot” (his words, not mine) and we stayed together for about two years. Just long enough for him to decide he was called to serve the Lord and join the seminary.
I cannot make this shit up.
After Luke, I had a dry spell for a bit, at which point, my friendMelly suggested I try online dating. “Everyone’s doing it,” she implored me. I knew she was right, so even though it felt extremelyweirdto post pictures of myself on the Internet in search of a man (my first set of pics looked like I was trying out for a “Missing Persons” spot on the side of an old-school milk carton), I had to suck it up and deal with it. I put myself out there on sites like PlentyofFish, Bumble, and Tinder, and dated a whole lot of train wrecks while trying to navigate my way through this new terrain. If someone were to check my Google search history around that time, one might find such interesting queries as “how to know if you’re being catfished” or “how to ghost a psycho.”
I tried to focus onme, published my first book, saved my money, and moved out of my parents’ house and into my current apartment in Brooklyn. Not too long after Melly’s wedding, I turned twenty-nine. All of a sudden, with the big 3–0 on the imminent horizon, I began to panic in earnest, thinking I would never meet someone. In reality, Melly was the only one of my friends who was married, but something about the number drove me crazy, and I felt like with each day that passed, more and more guys were disappearing off the market.
I once read that the older you get, the less your eggs care about which sperm they’ll take. So, picture this: Your young, cute eggs are feelin’ themselves, and they won’t just bring homeanysperm for insemination. Nope, they want thatgoodsperm. Meanwhile, the eggs in reserve sit around aging, and by the time they’re old, they’ll take basically whichever sperm can make it all the way up the canal. Like the old egg is saying, “Hey, you made it here, might as well let you in,” with a yawn and a careless shrug.
This is sort of what happened to me once I saw thirty looming. Convinced there would be nobody left on the market, I began discovering new websites to post my profile on.
I was twenty-nine and two months old (with one foot clearly in the grave) when I met Scott Gross on freezerburn.com, a dating app designedfor women looking for love who are also considering freezing their eggs. The site’s promise (Find love in three ovulation cycles or receive a $500 credit towards egg freezing at one of our exclusive partner facilities!) sounded like a win-win, and sure enough, I was matched with Scott halfway through my second month online. He checked all the surface criteria: 1) he was not living with his parents, 2) he had a full-time job, and 3) he had more hair on his head than on his body. (In fairness, he skated by on the last one. His lower back harbored a situation that he referred to as “peach fuzz,” but if I ever saw a piece of fruit covered in long brown curly hairs like that I would assume it had gone very, very bad.) However, Scott’s capacity for email was garbage, and it was only because I chide myself for being too hard on people that I accepted his invitation to go out on a date. I’ll never forget the message:Drinx @ mcsweenys? 7pm 2nite?
McSweeney’s, a pub known throughout Brooklyn for its hot roast beef dip and wide variety of Irish ales on tap, was only a few stops away from my house on the Q train. I wore tight black jeans that showed off my curves, tall black boots, a flowy gray sweater, and a leather jacket. Scott showed up a few minutes late, but one flash of his sheepish grin and I was hooked. He admired my outfit, didn’t say a word when I ordered the (technically sharable) cheese fries and ate them all myself, and blew out to the side when he burped after a long swig of his beer (instead of burping in my face). He reminded me of a bearded collie, with his hair pushed back in a trucker’s cap, a first-trimester belly that he could still suck in if he wanted to covered up by an old Linkin Park T-shirt, and an average-looking lower half clad in a pair of loose-fitting jeans. He told corny jokes, still smoked weed on rare occasions, and watched football every Sunday with his friends from college at a bar in eastern Queens. He held in his farts when we had sex, but let them out right afterward, always announcing them first. He shared an apartment in Williamsburg with two other guys, so going to visit him was not unlike taking a trip to a fraternity house.
But Scott had a job in Manhattan, working as the tech guy for a small CPA firm, and he liked to watch movies, eat out, and sleep in on the weekends, which made us a pretty good match. I could live with the fact that the toilet seat at his place was always up (and you could bet on finding at least three or four stray pubes lining the rim), or that I could never leave a toothbrush at his apartment because I couldn’t be sure it would remain unused by one of his drunk roommates. He was college educated and ordinary, which seemed nonthreatening, at the very least.
After dating for maybe a month or so, we began spending more and more time at my place, and because there was an actual kitchen there stocked with proper supplies like pots and pans, I learned that Scott liked to cook. His propensity for creating fun meals out of cheap household basics (like chicken and dumpling stew made with Bisquick or turkey and cheese rollups baked in crescent roll dough) took our relationship to the next level.Finally! Some common ground!I thought. I loved taste-testing Scott’s creations, and he would revel in my excitement with that puppy-dog look in his eyes and heavy hints that I could reward him in the sack.You like my chicken parm? Well, perhaps you’d like a taste of the meat stick in my pants for dessert!Often, I obliged, because—well, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do in a relationship?—and I guess that made me a “keeper,” because after the requisite trips to visit Mom and Dad on both sides, and after nine months of cohabitating at my place on my dime, Scott proposed to me after sex on my thirtieth birthday.
“We should get married,” he said. “You wanna?”
That was it. No ring, no bravado. But I said yes, and it counted as a real proposal. We picked out a ring together, and over a big Italian dinner in the city, I asked Alisha, Tori, and Melly if they would be my bridesmaids. Melly was already married, and Alisha was engaged. Tori was anti-marriage, despite living with her girlfriend of four years. Theywere all so happy that I had finally found someone who checked off all my boxes, so of course, they eagerly agreed.
I should have taken it as a sign. My married name was going to beGrace Gross. The universe was definitely trying to tell me something.
Then, hunting season began. House hunting. Registry hunting. Dress hunting. I tried to keep my cool through it all. Scott could have cared less about any of the details. He felt the wedding was my job to plan, but I dragged him to everything, insisting that it was supposed to be the romantic affair ofourdreams. We had a budget and my parents had given us ten grand. Melly—my maid of honor—had recently gone through the same thing, only her parents were super over-the-top generous, and she wasnoton a budget, so she enjoyed helping me navigate the “challenge” of dress shopping with financial restrictions. A natural shopper, she also loved reliving the trips to Bed Bath & Beyond with the scanner gun. We put together a binder of ideas, like a Pinterest board but in physical book form, while Scott tagged along, absently surfing the Internet on his phone, giving us the silent thumbs-up whenever we presented him with an idea. In retrospect, I could have suggested that we get married in a vat of green Jell-O, and he would have responded like the human form of an emoji.
About four months before our wedding, we were narrowing down venue options when, out of the blue, Scott’s mother recommended a wedding planner. She was the daughter of a friend of the family, but Scott hadn’t seen her since they were toddlers. Since she was just getting started in the business, she needed referrals and Scott’s mother was happy to help. Scott didn’t care—his mom’s interference meant it was one thing less for him to do. ButIcared: Hadn’t she seen the binder I made? I was perfectly capable of planning my own wedding! And yet, I obliged, not wanting to piss off my soon-to-be mother-in-law.
Scott and I met Ilana Shapiro on a Saturday, that much I remember.Scott made first contact on the telephone, and they made plans for us to all get together for breakfast.
Ilana was tiny, with blond, wavy hair, a pointy nose, and pouty lips. Even with heels on she made me look like a gorilla by comparison. She was skittish and giggly, and her voice was reminiscent of a baby.
I hated her from the moment I laid eyes on her.
We met in a diner on Long Island, and while Scott ate pancakes and I ate the meat-lover’s omelet, Ilana ordered cottage cheese and fruit. She finished four whole bites of it before pushing it aside, claiming to be full. Then, we rode in her car from one wedding venue to the next. Scott sat in the front because he needed the leg space, and I sat in the back seat like a third wheel. After visiting seven different catering halls, we decided to call it quits for the day, and she dropped us off at the nearest Long Island Rail Road station.
“Well,” I said, when we were seated side by side in the train car. “I’m never doingthatagain.”
“I thought it was kinda cool,” he replied. “Seeing all those places. I kept trying to figure out which one had the best bar setup.”
I rolled my eyes. “How about this? You narrow it down to three venues, and I’ll choose from the three.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Definitely,” I said.
