Someone who’ll make me laugh/someone to be my better half/keep me warm under the sack/share with me my midnight snack:

Sometimes I find myself playing this game in my head called “the man I marry will ____.”

This is not some fucked up, impossible-expectation Ally McBeal game where I say, oh, he’ll drive this kind of car and always bring me flowers, or some sort of physical attraction tally where I say, man, I love brown eyes and English accents. It’s also not some game where I try to predict or choose cute or sweet little things I want to happen to me someday—I prefer to be surprised. It’s just things I realize are inevitable, and I end up adding them to this mental list.

I don’t use the list as any sort of stupid checklist when I meet someone, but every once in awhile, when I’m with someone who does one of those things on it, I feel all fluttery. Sometimes I meet new people and they do things that I didn’t even realize were on the list until that minute. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has touched the list more than three or four times. I’m young yet.

I can’t tell you everything that’s on the list, because that would be cheating, but I can share a few of the less personal ones:

The man I marry will let me fall asleep first.
The man I marry will be tall.
The man I marry will be smarter than I am.
The man I marry will love children as much as I do.
The man I marry will stroke my hair a lot.
The man I marry will make me laugh so hard I can’t breathe.
The man I marry will not be adverse to sing alongs.
The man I marry will like that I talk a lot.
The man I marry will read.
The man I marry will read in bed.
The man I marry will read with me in bed.
The man I marry will read to me in bed.

There are many things that the man I will marry will not do, like wear baseball caps backwards, or wear baseball caps period, but that list isn’t nearly as much fun. It’s also a lot longer and tends to veer towards bitterness. This list makes me happy and excited every single time I remember it, or add to it.

I added one to it this weekend.

(Just so you know, it was really hard not to end this with “the man I marry will bring it between the sheets.” It’s implied. Like ustedes.)