Who You Know by Theresa Alan Page A

married was twenty-five. I was twenty-seven. I had seen the men women over thirty had the opportunity to date, and it wasn’t pretty. If I didn’t get married soon, I would probably never get married. It’s better to be a divorcée than a spinster. Divorcées might be failures, but at least people knew somebody had loved them at one time. Eventually I’d meet somebody who would give me herpes and cheat on me and beat me up and then stalk me when I broke up with him.
    I hadn’t been looking for a husband, but when Greg came along, I knew we’d get married. I just had this quiet feeling; our relationship felt so right. Is that the feeling that people who marry their high school sweethearts have? It must be. But I don’t think I could have appreciated how right things felt with Greg if I hadn’t had the close-but-not-quite experiences with Alex and Ryan. Alex was fun and sexy. As I realized later, well after we’d broken up and I’d gained some perspective, he wasn’t a particularly nice person. And Ryan had never really been my intellectual equal, not like Greg.
    I don’t believe that we each have only one soul mate, but I do think finding someone who is as attracted to you as you are to him, who you can laugh with and still have something to talk about years down the road, is as rare as a four-leaf clover, and if you manage to find him, you should count yourself very lucky. That doesn’t mean there aren’t moments when I’d like to push Greg down a long flight of cement stairs. Happily, these moments are infrequent, and most of the time I consider myself fortunate indeed.
    Plus, after seeing Jen and my girlfriends date one self-absorbed loser after another, I really appreciated how good Greg was to me. He was so sweet. He wasn’t into football or porn or getting wasted with his buddies. He didn’t spend all his money on beer and electronic equipment. I wasn’t about to let such a good guy get away.
    Why hadn’t we had the forethought to elope?
    Why were wedding dresses made to make our asses look like the hindquarters of a wildebeest?

AVERY
    Romance and Other Marketing Ploys
    I did not want to get out of bed Saturday morning. Something about going to the bar made my mood sour. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that nursing two margaritas throughout the evening had left me sober enough to notice the desperation that filled the air like humidity, heavy and thick. I’d been sober enough to watch Les watch Jen, sober enough to calculate the chasm of difference between thirty (my age) and twenty-five (Jen’s age).
    Eventually, however, my rumbling stomach managed to motivate me to get out of bed.
    I sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of yogurt and fruit and flipped through the newspaper. As usual, I started with the horoscopes, then the comics, then the celebrity gossip. Eventually I’d glimpse at the serious news, doing my best to avoid reading anything depressing. If a headline talked about rape, murder, war, or robbery, I didn’t read it. I used to read everything, and I’d end up crying in my cereal bowl and be sad all day. I flipped the page and froze when I saw Gideon smiling up at me from an ad for men’s cologne. He looked gorgeous as always. His long dark hair, his dark eyes courtesy of a Cherokee grandmother. He was thin, but his muscles were well defined. It was easy to see why I’d been so proud to be seen with him, why I’d wanted to brag to everyone, “Look! This gorgeous guy actually wants me to be his wife!”
    I quickly shut the paper and pulled a stack of e-mails from Art I’d printed off at work from my bag.
    As soon as I began reading them, my mood lightened. I’d been a lot happier since I’d begun writing Art. It gave me hope that someone decent was out there. All weekend, I actually looked forward to going into work Monday so I could hear from him again.
    It was hard