Young Beti women in Cameroon regularly assert that becausethey are uncertain about what the future will bring, they cannotmake any plans. But they do plan, strategize, and indeed actquite effectively. The purpose of this paper is to explain howthey do so, specifically in reference to marriage and reproduction,and thereby to contribute to a general understanding of inten-tionality, uncertainty, and social action. Action has been com-monly theorized as the fulfillment of a prior intention. But un-certainties, both the probabilistic uncertainty of events and thesubject’s experience of uncertainty, threaten to dissolve the linkbetween intention and its fulfillment. This paper argues that, atleast under the conditions of uncertainty applicable in contempo-rary Africa, effective social action is based not on the fulfillmentof prior intentions but on a judicious opportunism: the actorseizes promising chances. In other words, women’s negation ofWeberian rational action is not a lack; by engaging in heteroge-neous activities without a clear trajectory in mind, they are ableto get by. The paper makes this argument on the basis of ethno-graphic and demographic data from Cameroon and theoreticalanalyses of the work of Searle, Schutz, and Hume