30 Stories About Couples Who Made A Pact To Get Married If They Were Both Still Single By Thirty

14. When I was seventeen, I had a friend, B, who was basically a twin in personality. Of course I was attracted to her (and yet hated myself, go figure), but I never said anything.

We grew up in a small town and attended a high school with only 220 people, so everyone knew we were tight. We were best buds, sharing memes before memes were a thing, and generally being disruptive in an unthreatening kind of way.

• One day, we stole a municipal “No Dumping” sign that was put up somewhere because she wanted to hang it in her bathroom.

• At a school dance, during one of those insufferable nineties slow-dance songs, I spun her around—like centripetally, with legs horizontal to the floor—while the other kids were having their awkward hormonal moments.

• She used to come to my bedroom window with buttercups (which was her nickname for me). I once joked it was like Clarissa Explains it All, and she rightly observed that it was different because my window was ground level because I lived in the basement.

• Someone we barely knew once asked me permission to ask her out, and to see if she’d ever mentioned him to me, because people knew I would know.

Anyway, the point is, we were close. One night, after joking about Bert being evil, we were talking about relationships and how neither one of us was particularly eager to be in one. (Yeah. I liked her. I was a coward. I was a friend and not eager to screw that up, so I played along.)

At some point marriage came up and we decided together that if there came a point when we were both thirty, and we weren’t seeing anyone, we’d get married.

I think we were serious, too. I know this because we wrote it on the roll of pink toilet paper on which we would scribe all the interesting things we did and would do. (It’s a long story.) The things contained on that scroll were sacred to us. I still have it in my keepsake box, somewhere.

I never did tell her how I felt about her.

Alas, her thirtieth birthday rolled around (she was a year younger than me), and we were both in relationships. I don’t think we ever seriously brought it up. We haven’t talked in a long time, but I wonder if she remembers that particular pledge we made?

I consider this to be a successful relationship because it fulfilled the purpose it needed to at the time—we were close and it was a way to face a scary future. It was sort of an informal pledge to stick together and see it through. And in that, it worked.

We found other people to be with in the end, and that was probably for the best. Yet, every once in a while, I wonder what might have been if we’d made good on it, and if our lives would have been better or worse for it.