The night my family pressured me into blind dates and drove me into a quiet bar, I picked up a man.
His name was Zhu Chen. He was a VP at an investment bank, and his family had pushed him to his wits' end too. We sealed the deal in three sentences: get married, keep our families off each other's backs, and divorce when the contract expires.
I thought it was just a transaction where we each got what we wanted. But he started adding his own scenes without permission: he remembered I put two grains of sea salt in my coffee, secretly checked my calendar every week to arrange rides in advance, and even secretly got certified as a doula.
The contract said "provisional," but he insisted on changing it to "permanent."
I got married on a whim at 32. Was it a bad deal? Hard to say. But that night I walked through the door of that quiet bar was the most worthwhile impulse of my life.
