The Starter Husband

The Starter Husband

The Starter Husband

After graduating from college, Andi jetted off to culinary school in Paris, then switched to journalism, where she climbed the ranks, moving from one semiglamorous job to the next — all the while hooking up, dating, dumping, and moving on. She's a perfectly modern gal, a gorgeous mess of neuroses and contradictions — the kind who never pictured herself married by 27, divorced by 28, and remarried with two toddlers at 35.

But along the way, she met Tucker. "He was what I was supposed to marry. He was what everybody else in my life wanted for me and what the world tells you you're supposed to want," she says. "I got sucked into the idea. I was in my 20s, and I felt like there was so much pressure from my family to find the perfect person. I just felt like, God, I'd be stupid if I didn't do this."

Within months of promising to love and honor and cherish Tucker forever, she knew she had made a huge mistake. The problem? He was boring. "Wholly uncomplicated," as she puts it. The kind of guy who reads Tom Clancy books on the couch and watches Adam Sandler movies while dreaming of white-picket fences. Going to depressing French movies, leapfrogging over the less ambitious on the company ladder — those were the things that excited Andi. "The idea of spending my life with someone like that seemed stifling," she says. "It finally just got to me that he was so ... sunny."

I hoist my drink in that you-go-girl kind of way, but I'm struck by her casual disregard for the institution. Marriage used to be a big deal. How could she slip in and out of it so easily? She'd plodded along for nearly 12 months, passive-aggressively avoiding her relationship by consuming herself with the restaurant openings and black-tie benefits that were part of her job. But then Tucker started talking about having children. "To me, once you have kids, you can't get out," she says. "When he began asking about a family, I felt like that was too final of a commitment. That's when I had to say, "Okay, I've got to fish or cut bait here.'"