Once again the other night I found myself sitting at a cramped dining table in a part of London I didn’t know existed outside of Dickens novels. And I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t the food that bothered me. (Although why, in a shepherds pie, is there always five inches of potato to half an inch of meat?) It wasn’t that I was worried about my car parked outside in this particular neighbourhood. What bothered me was the purpose of this dinner: for me to meet Sarah (I’ve changed the name).

I love my friends. But something terrible happens to them after they get married. They become marriage evangelists. With the starry eyed zeal of Victorian missionaries, they proselytise the benefits of settling down to the unhitched masses. As if my life, like theirs, could finally have meaning if only I would welcome matrimony into my life as the one true savior. Read the rest of this entry »