💻 FIELD GUIDE 59: Risking it all

In 2016, I found myself in a group on Facebook with HUNDREDS of pregnant women from all over the world due to have their children in April of 2017. Ashley was in this group with me.

I have to admit, we’ve not spoken much but now, theres a newer, much smaller group where we’ve managed to connect more often than the last. All 37 of us with our April 2017 kids. We’ve got a special kind of connection. Which is mostly to collectively commiserate about parenthood and spousehood woes, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

This week Ashley is telling us about the riskiest thing she’s ever done. Sometimes the benefits that come with risking it all can lead to something we never ever expected.

Name

Ashley Lauren

Soundtrack

(Spotify)

For the longest time I lied about how I met my husband. Back when this story began, online dating wasn’t a popular thing — there was no Hinge, no Tinder. I wouldn’t say it was taboo, but almost; definitely on the fringe of how two could people meet. I still remember how my mother looked at me suspiciously when I admitted to joining match.com and eHarmony, why couldn’t I just be like everyone else and meet a nice boy at a bar?

I couldn’t.

I was always better online.

So this is the true story of how it actually happened, and once you read it you’ll be among the very few who know it wasn’t a chance encounter at Starbucks, but a series of calculated moves and deliberate (albeit questionable) decisions on my part that walked me headfirst right into what turned out to be forever.

It was 2006, I’d just moved back home to my parent’s house from the sublet in Evanston, Illinois, I’d spent my summer enjoying. Back home life had to begin, and for real this time. I took a job with a makeup artist, I became the director of her midwest division, and also familiarizing myself with Craigslist. I worked gigs in my off time, spending every dollar I made at the mall.

One day, outside of H&M, there was a man offering my best friend and I the chance to go on an all-expenses paid cruise. Of course, we’d have to win it, he said (I think he might have even winked) pushing the hot pink pad in front of us, handing us pens to fill out all our most basic information: Name, age, and phone number.

Of course we had to try. The two of us would have the best time.

I’d all but forgotten about it when the call came three weeks later.

I’d won… the catch — because there is always a catch — was that it was a timeshare cruise, and in order to collect I needed the one thing I didn’t have: a husband. Even a serious boyfriend, the woman on the other end of the phone told me, would work, but I couldn’t go alone and best friends didn’t count either.

So I did what any girl would do, I set out to find a stand-in husband. I figured there had to be someone who would play pretend for the sake of a cruise, that part would be easy, but where to cast this role was trickier. All I knew about gig-work was finding it on Craigslist and so I turned there and posted an ad: Husband Wanted for Cruise.

I was being facetious, of course I had no plans of marrying a man from Craigslist — but I would fake it for a week if that’s what it took. I got a few replies, but one stood out, his name was Mark, he was 26 and lived close enough by that he’d love to buy me a coffee so we could talk more. He’d attached a picture — my most basic requirement — of him at a roulette table in Las Vegas, wearing a cowboy hat.

We exchanged numbers, he called, and then we spent the entire week getting to know each other. I loved his voice, the way he said my name, and so it was an easy yes when he mentioned coffee again for that upcoming Saturday.

We met at Starbucks, which would go on to become what we told everyone when they asked how we met. It wasn’t a full lie, but it also curled around the truth, protecting it and us from any judgement.  

We also never went on the cruise, all these years later I can’t remember why, but it just never happened. What did happen was this: We fell crazy in love, and three months later he asked me to marry him, that was the easiest yes of my life.