Typical writer. My first attempt to figure out what I'd done wrong in my first marriage––and determined not mess up again if I ever got married again––happened in my imagination and on the page. From the time I got divorced in 1991 to the time I met my future wife in 1997, I wrote (and rewrote) a lot of short stories about men screwing up the love thing. Sometimes by self-sabotage, knowingly or not. Sometimes because they simply aren't able to handle intimacy. Sometimes because they aren't sure if they've found the right person, or if the are the right person. 

During this time I wrote about twenty-five stories in this vein, and once I got engaged to Jen I couldn't write them anymore. I tried, but the stories sucked. They didn't have much urgency because I'd figured out some crucial facts about the love thing that had caused me to fail so completely in my first marriage. I didn't realize that I'd been writing a book called Wifeshopping until I was deep in the revision process and winnowing down those twenty-five stories to the dozen best. I asked a friend if he was dating anybody, and he said

Well, I'm kinda wifeshopping

and boom, both the title of my short story collection and the focus of my emotional life clicked into place. I wrote about men who sought marriage and failed because I sought marriage and failed. My literary and psychic agendas aligned completely (sort of like they do now, with daddylabyirinth.) While none of the stories in it are completely autobiographical, I've lived through every single one of the characters' emotional experiences. Their screwups and almost-loves are my screwups and almost-loves, and when I stopped screwing up in that way, the vein of those stories dried up. 

It was a chicken-or-egg thing. I stopped writing the stories because I'd found the woman I wanted to marry, and I found her because I'd done some intense self-psychotherapy through my fiction in the intervening time. The first steps toward fatherhood happened on those pages, too. The time I put into them is the best investment I ever made. 

A few people have purported that the title is sexist, imputing that women are something to be bought or sold. The price tag on the cover (not my idea) intimates that, too. But I don't see it that way, because the price I expected to pay for a wife was nothing less than my entire self. In that sense, I "bought" a wife in the same way I later "bought" my children. I put my life on the line and I rolled the dice. Ain't nothin' sexist about that, folks. You can't possess people when you give up yourself for them.