Page 2 of Thank you, Next

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Alex was still shaken by her encounter with Chase when she got home from work that night. The only good things about the day were that it was Friday, her DVR was chock-full of her favorite shows, and she’d remembered to put a bottle of rosé into the fridge before heading to the office.

Unfortunately, Chase wasn’t the first former spouse who’d hit on her before the ink on his divorce decree was dry. In fact, her clients’ former spouses were more likely than a barista or a bartender to hit on her these days. The flirtation from associates at Trader Joe’s hawking samples felt like it came from a purer place than when a man who had recently blown up his marriage—likely through some real douchebag behavior—decided that she’d be a good next victim.

On days like today, Alex didn’t understand why anyone would get married in the first place. It was all well and good to want companionship, help with household expenses, and someone to have sex with on speed dial, but making it legal seemed unwise for most people.

In Alex’s professional and familial experience, getting married was like playing the lottery. Sure, you had all these hopes and dreams about what you might do with the jackpot before the numbers were pulled. But very few people actually won and got to live out those dreams. For most, it was a waste of resources that could be better put to use elsewhere.

And on days like today, she especially didn’t understand why some other women were so eager to be married. It ended so badly so often, and even her friends in good marriages sounded as though they were suffering from a very particular form of Stockholm syndrome. If Alex had a dollar for every time one of her married friends started a sentence with “I love my husband, but” and then recounted him doing something truly horrific, she could retire. Even though she’d dated a few guys whom she could have seen herself married to, she had never understood why married men were never expected to make sacrifices, other than the opportunity to sleep with other women without hiding it. And, considering the size of her client base, many of them couldn’t even manage to do that.

Somewhere along the line, Alex had decided that marriage wasn’t something she wanted. The grind of her job and the weight of her family history made her feel like she was uniquely fucked when it came to romantic relationships. There were men in her dating history whom she’d thought she’d been in love with, whom she’d pictured spending her life with, but none of those relationships had worked out. Now she made it explicit from the beginning that she only wanted to be in a relationship for as long as it was fun for everyone involved.

Alex’s negative view of marriage could not diminish her love of reality television shows about the institution—like Say Yes to the Dress. She also loved the Real Housewives, but that was essentially client development work. But watching a show where too-young women were emotionally abused by their mothers and future mothers-in-law while they tried on dresses that cost more than a used Toyota Corolla and made them look like cupcakes was more relaxing than candlelight yoga.

Even though she couldn’t envision getting married—ever—she did enjoy critiquing the truly audacious choices made on the show. It would be bad for her reputation if people knew that she had a secret wedding dress Pinterest board. No one wanted to hire a divorce attorney with a romantic streak, so Alex kept her love for the show a secret. But truthfully, it was one of the few things that made her feel better about her own romantic track record. Even though no one had ever asked her to marry them, at least she didn’t have anything with a sweetheart neckline or a see-through panel around her midriff in her history.

So yeah. She loved weddings, specifically wedding dresses. But she had serious questions about them—and marriage in general.

The one thing that truly bothered her on the show was how they never explained how one went to the bathroom in one of those things. What if they were sewn into the dress? Were they expected to hold it until they could take the dress off and perform their wifely duties for the first time? Alex found it fascinating and symbolic of the fact that—unless they won the lottery—wives weren’t expected to be human beings. One of her clients had told her that she’d never taken a dump in the same bathroom her husband used after he commented on her stinking up the bathroom on their third date. Before they’d bought a house with more than one bathroom, she’d waited until she got to the Starbucks to go every morning. For ten years.

As Alex sat down with her Big Gulp–sized glass of rosé, she was prepared to watch a twenty-one-year-old who thought a thirty-five-year-old who didn’t have bed frame was her soul mate. What she was not prepared for was to see a woman who looked eerily like Alex waxing poetic about Alex’s most recent ex-boyfriend.

She’d met Jason speaking on a Black Law Students Association panel at UCLA Law School, featuring four Black law partners under forty. When she’d walked in and seen all six foot four of Jason, she’d been glad she hadn’t found an excuse to cancel her appearance. It wasn’t that she hated giving back, but she always felt exhausted after socializing with new people. She’d planned to sneak out in the first ten minutes of the happy hour after the panel when Jason brought her over a glass of boxed wine. He’d smiled at her, and the rest of the room had fallen away. They’d talked for the whole cocktail hour and then he’d taken her out to dinner. It had been so long since she’d liked someone that she’d been a little helpless to resist him at first.

Of course that had changed later on, but she’d been intoxicated with Jason that first night.

Seeing Jason on a show about weddings was doubly shocking because Jason had told Alex in no uncertain terms—multiple times during the months they’d dated—that he didn’t believe in marriage. That was why Alex had started dating him in the first place. She would never have to wonder whether she’d won the lottery or thrown away her time and money for a dream that only came true for one in a hundred million. There was no danger that she’d end up hog-tied in a Pnina Tornai dress, later trying to furtively poop in the locker room before her third SoulCycle class of the day because a man who hadn’t pushed a watermelon out of his vagina thought she was too fat a month after doing so.

She’d thought they were on the same page.

But Jason had apparently lied to her about his aversion to marriage. As Alex watched the photo montage of his relationship history with this other woman, she started to feel sick. At some point, she put down her wine and leaned toward the television. She clasped her hands together so hard that the joints in her knuckles ached. It was better than what she really wanted to do—throw something at the TV.

She didn’t even know why. They’d had a nice few months together, but she hadn’t been in love with Jason. They were compatible—in bed and out—but she hadn’t thought about him when he wasn’t around. Her feelings for Jason were warm and pleasant, but there hadn’t been any passion between them. They’d parted ways amicably, and she’d thought they would both sail off into another chapter of serial monogamy.

Still, she seethed as she watched this woman pick out a dress to marry a man who’d apparently changed his life plans in the nine months since he’d dumped Alex. She didn’t know why, but thinking about him moving on with this woman formed a sinkhole in her chest. Instead of doing anything about it, like changing the channel, Alex sipped her pink wine and really looked at the woman who was going to marry Jason—her handsome, financially stable, erudite ex-boyfriend who’d told her that he’d rather put his balls in a panini press every morning than spend the rest of his life with one person.

And as the woman on the screen picked out a dress that was so simple and classic that it made Alex’s chest ache, she realized that Jason had only had an aversion to marriage because he couldn’t countenance the prospect of marriage with Alex.

After the episode ended on a frame of Jason’s fiancée crying as her mother gave her a blank check to purchase the dress she chose, Alex turned the sound down and opened up the Facebook app on her phone. She usually stayed off it because it was for boomers and conspiracy theorists, but she hadn’t given up her account because her sister occasionally posted pictures of her nieces on there. They lived a thousand miles away, and she missed them. Hanging out with them on Christmas gave her a vague understanding of why her sister had volunteered to have her vagina ripped open in order to bring them into the world. But she wasn’t descending into the bowels of social media at ten o’clock on a Friday night to admire the fruits of her sister’s loins.

She was on a mission, a journey, and a quest.

Alex had never looked up her exes before. In her mind, that was for girls who didn’t have anything going on in their own lives. Her mother, an anthropology professor, would find it fascinating and might even write a whole book about how the American patriarchy twisted young women’s minds. She would then send it to Alex’s sister, who wouldn’t read it, and then they would have something to fight about over the traditional Thanksgiving dinner that Alex’s sister insisted they all attend.

It would be a refreshing change of topic from the ethnographic presentation about stolen Native lands that Alex’s mother usually insisted on as a condition of her attendance.

Jason still had a Facebook profile. Sure, he’d stopped posting on it almost a decade ago, but his new fiancée—that felt so strange to say, even in her head—tagged him in a lot of posts. Alex didn’t know how long she got lost in photos of Jason smiling at parties and dinners. He’d never even wanted to go to parties with Alex. At first, Alex had thought he’d been trying to keep their relationship a secret—as though he was embarrassed by her—but he’d explained that he was just sort of a homebody. Alex couldn’t help but wonder if that was a bold-faced lie.

One thing that Alex knew was absolutely true for her was that she didn’t want to get married. Given her family history and the carnage she saw in her professional life, she knew that she wasn’t cut out to do the hard work that it seemed to take to make a marriage work. Over the years, she’d dated a few men she’d thought she could make things work with, but that was a long time ago.

By the time she’d met Jason, she’d been so certain that marriage wasn’t in her future, she’d stopped hoping to be chosen. She’d stopped dreaming about a future beyond a few weeks or months with any of her romantic interests.

She loved her nieces but wasn’t interested in becoming a mother. She might have been a good parent if held to mid-1970s standards—when benign neglect was acceptable. But she’d seen too many contentious custody battles where an extra thirty minutes of screen time was a major issue to take the risk. Even though she’d likely be able to afford help.

Not wanting children made it easier to not want marriage. For most people, it was a package deal. Casual acquaintances often expressed horror when she said that she didn’t want children. Even her sister acted like wanting to sleep in on the weekends and pee alone made her the witch from “Hansel and Gretel.” Most people got so stuck on the no-kid thing that they let the no-marriage thing slide.

Alex had truly thought she was over the fact that a happy, long-term partnership wasn’t going to happen for her. Her family history was riddled with misbegotten matches, and her job had made her jaded. And she’d never met anyone who’d made her question that for long enough to make a difference. She closed the Facebook app and flipped through the contacts on her phone, not quite sure what she was searching for. Before she could stop herself, Alex was methodically clicking through all the profiles of every person she’d dated who had a Facebook or Instagram account. To her horrified fascination, she discovered that all of them were now happily married or partnered. What fascinated and horrified her was that they all seemed to have partnered off right after breaking things off with Alex.

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