Which clock is actually yours?
Four numbers answer four situations. The wrong one is worse than none.
Where are you with him right now?
There's no right answer here, and no wrong one.
How long has it been?
Nobody's asked you to put a number on this before.
Who brings up what happens next?
You already know this one. That's the point.
In an ordinary month, how much of your life has him in it?
This is the one the book tells you to count.
You have not been asked to guess at anything yet.
That is rarer than it sounds at eleven at night.
Every answer so far was a thing that happened, or a thing you did. That is deliberate. The number at the end is built out of those, and it's a number about you.
Are you still working out what you want, or do you already know?
This decides your number. Your age doesn't come into it.
Have you said what you want out loud, once, as a plain fact?
Hinting doesn't count, and you already knew that.
What came back?
His words only. What he did with them comes next.
Four things you have been told about waiting.
Every one was said kindly. Not one is a number.
Four of these were handed to you. The fifth is the only one that's yours.
The rule that runs all four numbers.
Three of them are the wrong number for you.
Chosen afterwards, it moves. Something warm lands on a Wednesday, the date stretches, and you'd swear you never changed your mind.
"Yours can be different. What can't be different is that you set them before he answers, not after." From the chapter What If He.
Have you moved your own deadline before?
Either way, that's why the date goes down first.
What the waiting costs, in months.
Not in years, and not in how old you are.
Say it in month two and you know where you stand by month three, instead of by next autumn. These are months, not research. Nothing on this screen is a study.
The weeks have a job, and it isn't waiting.
The weeks only work if you do nothing inside them.
Nobody's sitting in a waiting room with a magazine.
"What you do: nothing. Not 'hey, what did you think about what I said?' Not a 'you okay?' text. You go on with your life." From the chapter What If He.
If one part of this got easier, which would you want first?
Pick the one you'd want tonight.
Who put this together.
The same person as you, a few years earlier.
She works in data for a consulting firm in Chicago, which means her days are spent telling companies their strategy isn't working. She married at thirty-one. This is her first book.
Working out which clock is yours.
Nobody else has been counting the months.
- Reading what you already know you want
- Matching it against what came back
- Lining it up with the four numbers
- Setting the date before he answers
Here is what you told me, and the number it points to.
Your number comes out of these three and nothing else.
- Where you are
- You have not said whether you are choosing or still deciding.
- What you have already said
- You have not said whether you have said it out loud yet.
- What came back
- You have not said what came back.
- Your number
- Your number depends on what came back, and you have not said. The rule holds whichever one is yours: pick it before he answers, not after.
This is a number about what you'll do. It isn't a prediction about him, and nothing here is a verdict on him.
Here is the part you have not done yet.
None of it depends on what he decides.
- TonightYou write the number down, before anything happens, where you can see it
- This weekYou know what counts inside the weeks, and what does not
- The minute after you say itYou know what to do with it
- When the number runs outYou decide once, on the date you chose, instead of deciding again every Wednesday
Four things that are yours. Not one of them is a guess about him.
Picking the number is the easy half. The weeks are the other one.
Wednesday is the hard part, not the arithmetic.
You tell it what happened. It helps you pick your number before he answers, keeps the fact separate from what you decided the fact meant, and tells you which week you're in and what that week asks for. It's a private guide on the phone that's already on the counter.
What it won't do, and this is the point: it won't predict what he does, or tell you what he meant, or help you build a case. Those are the things that make the weeks longer.