The husband list, and how to write one that actually changes something

Somewhere in your notes app there is a list. Tall. Kind. Earns well. Close to his mother, but not too close. Makes you laugh.

I am not going to make fun of it. I made one too. But I want to tell you why it has been sitting there for two years doing nothing, and what to write instead.

Why most husband lists do nothing

A shopping list describes a man. It does not change the woman writing it.

You can describe a six foot man who calls his mother every Sunday in perfect detail, and still say yes, next month, to someone who makes you feel small. Because the list never touched the thing that makes you say yes to less.

Your list is a preference. Your standard is what you actually accept when you are lonely on a Thursday. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them decides who you marry.

So we write two lists. The first one is the life. The second one is the woman. Almost nobody writes the second one.

List one: write the Wednesday, not the wedding

When I ask women what they want, I am usually handed a wedding. The outfit, the entrance, the photographs, the faces of the people who doubted them.

I understand it completely. But you are not trying to manifest one day. You are trying to manifest ten thousand ordinary ones. So write those down instead.

• Who wakes up first, and what happens in that first hour.
• What you talk about in the car, when there is nobody to perform for.
• What he does when you are unwell, or unreasonable, or plainly wrong.
• How money is discussed, and what that conversation sounds like.
• What a Sunday looks like when nothing special is happening.
• What happens after a disagreement, and how long it takes.

Write it in the present tense, as though you are describing a week you have already had. Do not write that he will be something. Write that he is. Your mind does not argue with the second one in the same way.

And keep it short enough to read in one breath. A list you cannot read daily is a list you will not read at all.

The rules I give my women

1. No names. If there is a name on your list it is not a list, it is a hope about one person, and that is a different problem: why you cannot manifest a specific person.
2. Describe how you are treated, not how he looks. You will forget the jawline inside a year. You will not forget how he speaks to you when he is tired.
3. Write what you will not accept. This is the part that works. I am not shouted at. I am not kept a secret. I am not the one who always adjusts.
4. Write the boring parts. Boring is where a marriage actually lives.
5. No more than a page. You are not describing a man to a police sketch artist.
6. Read it once a day, not ten times. Once, slowly, until you can feel it. Then put it away and go and live.

List two: the woman who already has this

Here is the list that almost no woman makes.

Take your first list, and beside it write who you would have to be for that life to be an ordinary Tuesday. Not aspirational. Just the plain facts of her.

• What she no longer explains.
• What she says no to, without a speech.
• What she does with an evening on her own.
• How she speaks to herself when she has got something wrong.
• What she has stopped apologising for.

This is not self improvement and I am not asking you to become a better person in order to deserve a man. You already deserve one. It is far more practical than that. The woman on list two does not accept the men who have been costing you years. That is the entire mechanism.

The list does not bring him faster. It makes you unavailable to the wrong one. That is what actually changes your timeline.

What to do with it daily

Two minutes. That is honestly all it takes.

1. Read list one once, slowly, in the present tense.
2. Read one line from list two and choose it for the day. One line, not the whole woman.
3. At night, write down one piece of evidence. One moment in that day when you were her. It can be very small. It will feel very small. It is not.

The evidence line is the part that changes women. Wanting is easy, and you have done a great deal of it already. Evidence is what makes your own mind stop arguing with you.

How long it takes

I cannot give you a date, and I would not trust anybody who does.

What I can tell you is the order I watch it happen in. First the list changes. Then, a few weeks later, a conversation you would have tolerated last month becomes impossible. Then a man who would have had six months of your life gets three weeks. Then there is space, and some quiet, and the quiet is the uncomfortable part nobody warns you about. Then things tend to move quickly.

I wrote mine before I knew his name

I had six heartbreaks before I met my husband. After the last one I wrote a list, and there was no name on it, because I did not have one to write.

What I wrote was how I wanted to be spoken to, and what I was finished accepting. Then I spent years actually becoming the woman on the second list. That is not a tidy story I tell on stage. It is the order it happened in, and it is why I say it to you so plainly. You become the woman first, and then love arrives.

I married Jas on 14 August 2022. The first year of marriage taught me more than any list did, because sharing your whole life with a man, every single day, is a different classroom altogether. But I would not have been in that classroom at all if I had spent those years waiting instead of preparing.