Marriage Crazy!

Ooohhh! Martha Stewart Living Wedding Special is on! Woooo! I have waited all year for this show. Martha's going to show us how to make fondant icing for our wedding cakes. Yeee! I love June: it's all about the weddings. Too bad I'm doomed to live my life alone forever and ever.

According to Statistics Canada, I'm doomed to live my life alone. I'm over 30 and unmarried, meaning that the probability that I will ever marry is getting slimmer and slimmer by the microsecond. Sure, I'm living with a guy, but we're never going to get married. At least I probably won't. He might. He'll leave me for a firm 20-year-old with the stats on her side. I'll be alone with my six hundred cats, living a miserable life as a spinster librarian with a tight chignon, dowdy clothes and glasses. So sad.

In fact, this is such a sad state of affairs that my local CBC radio station devoted a whole twenty minutes of their morning show to it. They had a panel and all. The panel -- two women and one man, all over thirty -- discussed their fates. They concluded that society's attitude toward older, single women was changing and that it's no longer bad to be an unmarried woman, but they still were holding out hope that they'd all get married. And one of the women had just gotten engaged. Yay!

What's so, so sad about this is that weddings are very important to women. All little girls dream of growing up and being swept off their feet by a handsome young man who will propose in a very romantic way, give them a ring and a beautiful fairy tale wedding with a big, poofy white dress. Of course, there are some little girls who don't dream of this, but we won't speak of them because obviously they don't exist because all little girls dream of their weddings. So when a little girl grows up and hits that unfortunate age of thirty and hasn't been married yet, it is sad, truly sad to think that her dreams are dead. DEAD.

I've said sad a lot in the last few paragraphs. That's because I'm sad. I'm sad because I never dreamt of a wedding and I never wanted a huge, honking diamond ring. I'm sad because I never wanted a giant cake with fondant icing. I never even wanted a white wedding dress (first of all, white really isn't my colour, and second, why would I want a dress I can wear only once?), making me truly a sad, sad girl. Even in high school, people knew I was sad. My high school Personal and Social Education (aka sex ed for Catholics) teacher (Hi there Mrs. Goulet. Despite your predictions, I'm not an alcoholic.) thought up this insane -- I mean GREAT! -- project where she paired up girls and boys to get "married." Each boy-girl pair had to organize a wedding and take care of a "baby" (an egg, a la Degrassi Jr. High) and then write up a report saying what happened in the first five years of marriage. I hated the project, so one day I sent my partner, Sammy, a note that said, "Let's say we're both architects. We're 27. We'll get married in the Aztec ruins in Mexico. I'll wear a hot pink dress. This isn't 4real so it's ok." Mrs Goulet, bless her heart, found my note and commented on it, "This is supposed to be '4real!' You should take this seriously."

Mrs Goulet knew that it was sad and wrong for a teenage girl not to want a Catholic mass, a nice white dress and a respectable reception. She put me straight. I wrote a nice report where I described my nice white dress and reception. I also got married at a respectable age of twenty, had kids at twenty-two and quit my job to raise the kids. Because that's what you're supposed to do. Too bad I didn't take Mrs. Goulet's advice to heart (she had the best of intentions). If I had, I'd be married by now and I wouldn't be looiking at the dark side of thirty knowing that now I will never have the fairy tale. So sad.

So now I'm watching Martha Stewart's wedding special, hoping that it'll kindle my desire to get married, so that maybe, just maybe, I'll tip those odds in my favour and get married before I end up not living up to society's expectations for me. I really need to learn to be a better person. Keep your fingers crossed because we really wouldn't want another unmarried woman out there mucking up the stats, even if she is in a stable, loving, relationship.

Now please excuse me, Martha's showing us how to make elegant centrepieces for our respectable reception.

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