“So, when are you getting married?”
It’s the standard smalltalk question, tossed out approximately five minutes into any new conversation, immediately following “Is that your boyfriend?” and then, “How long have you been together?” Now I’m left chugging my wine while I drudge up an answer, uneasily balancing my dislike of revealing personal information to someone I just met against the need to avoid insulting the speaker for asking a socially-condoned but still absurd question. Would I ask you why you’re still single? The size of your paychecks after taxes? When you lost your virginity? How much you earned in capital gains last year? Explain to me how it’s even remotely your business whether my longterm partner and I have discussed a life-altering and deeply intimate decision? The best is when they throw in the soulful eyes while delivering the question, their tone seeped in understated sympathy - you poor dear, you’ve stuck with him for that long and the bastard is still holding out on you! How tragic! You must spend your days sobbing into your herbal tea and poring through bridal magazines, praying fervently for a proposal while your ovaries shrivel into desiccated husks.
The scene occurs frequently enough that the concept of my being perfectly content with shacking up sans solitaire-set-in-platinum seems taboo. If it’s a particularly exciting night, I may even get hit with: “So! Is he The One??” The question is hilarious in its presumptuous but somehow cute archaism. The One? Honestly, what the hell does that mean? Is my relationship supposed to model some Wachowski Brothers screenplay? Human interactions are complex things, and women are no longer promised away at infancy and handed to a man in exchange for six cartloads of mead and goat skins. Will I be with this man until the day I die? Hell if I know - and the same goes for every other couple in this room, married or no. He’s definitely The One tonight, unless I meet some passing Hells Angels at this cocktail party and decide I’m due for a nice gang bang.
Ultimately, I’ll come up with something demure and polite, then discreetly change the subject. But one of these days I’ll have reached the 2-vodka-tonic tipping point and the answer I’m dying to give will just spill out:
“You know, we haven’t really talked about it. I figure we’ll just wait until he knocks me up.”