Point, Click, Love by Molly Shapiro

ball soup and told Ben’s mom she made the best stuffed cabbage she’d ever had.
    Everything about Ben pointed to a marriage proposal. The only thing that caused Annie concern was the possibility that he wouldn’t want to marry a non-Jew, but with his family being so welcoming, Annie figured it must not be an issue. Besides, one ofBen’s brothers was married to a woman named Brittany, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a ski-slope nose, so clearly there was a precedent.
    Annie kept waiting for Ben to bring up the subject of their future together, not wanting to be one of those women who had to give an ultimatum. But on her thirty-fifth birthday, she could hold out no longer.
    “So I think I’m having a midlife crisis,” Annie told Ben over a glass of champagne at their favorite French restaurant.
    “Unless you’re planning on dying young, I don’t think it’s a midlife crisis,” said Ben, taking a bite of his tuna tartare.
    “I guess I’m feeling kind of old. Don’t you ever feel that way?”
    “Nope,” he said, reaching over and taking a spoonful of Annie’s French onion soup.
    Annie was beginning to think that men in their thirties still believed that they would live forever and felt no rush to get married and start a family. The thirties were the new twenties.
    “Okay. Then I guess it’s just me,” said Annie, thinking this conversation was not going the way she had hoped. She was starting to feel a distance from Ben that she’d never felt before.
    “Don’t worry, Annie. You’re still young and beautiful, and have a long life ahead of you.”
    “I know,” she said. “But, well, I hate to do this to you, and I hate to be this kind of woman, but I have to ask. What do you think about the whole marriage thing?”
    “Are you asking me to marry you?” said Ben, trying to make light of it.
    “No, I’m asking if you ever think about marriage.”
    “Well, honestly, I don’t,” answered Ben. “I know I should, and I know that’s what people do, but I just don’t think about it much right now. I have time.”
    He has time? thought Annie. “Really? I didn’t think at age thirty-five we were still thinking we had all the time in the world.”
    “Listen, Annie,” said Ben, finally putting down his fork to give Annie his full attention. “The other thing is … Well, I thought you figured out that I can’t marry a non-Jew.”
    “Are you kidding me?”
    “No.”
    “But your family—they love me!”
    “Yes, they do. They love you. But if they knew you weren’t Jewish …”
    “What do you mean, ‘if they knew’?” asked Annie incredulously.
    “I think they think you’re Jewish,” he mumbled, looking down at his plate.
    “What?!”
    “You know, you’re from New York, and you sort of have that accent, and your name is Sax,” said Ben, pleading his case.
    “Sax with an ‘x.’ That’s different.”
    “Yeah, but they don’t know that.”
    “They don’t know because you never told them! Why, Ben? Why didn’t you tell them?”
    “I guess it was easier to lie.”
    “Easier? For whom? You?”
    “I just didn’t want to go there with them.”
    “I can’t believe this!” Annie looked at Ben as if she was looking at a stranger. “What about Brittany? She’s not Jewish.”
    “She is, actually.”
    “But I look more Jewish than Brittany! And she won’t even eat gefilte fish!”
    “Annie, I’m sorry. I thought … You never talked about marriage before, never, and I figured that you weren’t interested.”
    Annie broke up with Ben that night, but deep down she knew he was right. Maybe this was all her fault. In six years she had almost pathologically avoided the subject of marriage. Maybe she wasn’t interested in settling down with someone after all.
    Annie wondered if what she really wanted were all the things that came with marriage. Like the house. When Annie moved from New York to Kansas City, one of the things she was most excited about was the prospect of owning