WHY I'M NOT MARRIED

I thought I was a good person. I buy The Big Issue. I have never amputated a daddy long legs. I don’t covet my neighbour’s husband (even when he is chopping logs and the sweat is pouring down his back … ahem…cough... ). So imagine my shock when Tracey McMillan’s Huffington Post column, “Why You’re Not Married’, informs me that the reason I’m still unmarried is because I am either a bitch, a slut, a liar, shallow, selfish, or not good enough!

(Well Tracey, for your information, I’m definitely not shallow.)

Of course, this isn’t the first time my domestic situation has been the focus of moral panic. In the early days, my poor long-suffering mother was so "sickened to the core" by my sordid shacking-up experiment that she refused to enter our house. Instead she would stay in the car outside (whilst my father came in to see us), weeping with a gusto not seen since the days of the prophet Jeremiah.  At some point, my father would take her a flask of coffee, and from our vantage point inside the house of sin, we would watch her wind down the car's misty windows, ever so slightly, to receive the offering.

My mother has since accepted the situation. But there are still those who think it their duty to point me towards the Altar of Hymen. A man in my neighbourhood – YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE – often calls me Mrs J, and once introduced me as “unmarried” to a member of the PTA. Have mercy for heaven’s sake! Not the PTA!! My next-door neighbours –YOU ALSO KNOW WHO YOU ARE – bought me a wedding planner!

It is not that I am against marriage. Jane Austen rocks. I like Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. And I loved Four Weddings and a Funeral (except for that lame exchange at the end when that whining irritating fine actress Andie Mac Dowell says, “Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed.” Well of course it is you dozy cow. Get a f**kin pac-a-mac.) But I digress.

It’s just that the idea of all that wedding decision-making brings me out in hives. I'm someone who agonises over the question “What’s your favourite colour?” Deciding what to make for tea is a daily nightmare that begins at about three o'clock with a simple question, but ends, two hours later, with me staring catatonically into a bleak, rancid fridge, as a foul-mouthed demonic presence in my brain shouts "beans, fish fingers, bread, eggs, bread for godsakes, fuckin beans, sausages, chips, what the fuck is wrong with you …" and so on and so on… until I cave in and phone my lovely partner who is not my husband, sobbing.

You see? It just wouldn't be nice.