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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Every single person you know is married.\n\n Or at least, if you are a Single Person of a Certain Age, it may seem that way.\n\n First, there were the couples who started dating freshman year of high school. These are the ones who got married when you still felt too young, and the thought of sexual exclusivity with the person who deflowered you next to a pile of androgynous, cologne-scented cargo pants filled you with pity. But by now, you may have held their sweet-smelling, precious children, all named after states, presidents, French \"Mother\" sauces, or things that rhyme with \"Craisin,\" and thought, Hey, this doesn't seem so bad.\n\n After the Too Young Marrieds, there was the post-college wave: twenty-five through twenty seven is a blur of friends in shiny vests and wilting boutonni\u00E8res gripping sweaty Bud Lights in hundreds of banquet halls bathed in fuchsia lighting. During this period of time, you may have still felt some kind of superiority at never having posed for a black-and-white engagement photo set, spooning on a fountain like a pair of homeless lunatics.\n\n You might have felt a twinge of jealousy when all the med school students married other med school students, or when the law students woke up from their nightmarish hangovers and said, \"What have I become?\" to a mirror before proposing to someone beautiful and tolerant. Grad students in non-lucrative fields finally had good news at Christmas. \"Yes, Dad, I'm still only getting a Ph.D. in Musicology, but this is Ellen, she's picked out obscure jazz-musician baby names and is very aware that her fertility is already in decline.\"\n\n You probably felt good for your country and for humanity when your monogamous homosexual friends were able to make honest legal monogamous homosexuals out of each other. Maybe you felt a little sad when that slutty lesbian friend who used to horrify you with \"hood piercing\" talk over Mexican food met a nice nurse practitioner and loved her so much that they decided never to put their entire hands in somebody else for all eternity.\n\n Then finally it was just you. Well, you and the guy from high-school Spanish. The one who wore the floor-length leather trench coat and posted late-night song lyrics on social networking sites. You two. Desperadoes. \n\n Now, maybe, there's just you.\n\n If you're single because you want to be, fantastic. Whether you are Jack Nicholson, or some kind of shut in with a folio of unpublished poetry about sparrows, accept that your choice is your choice. However, we live in a couple culture, and if you are single, accept its attendant irritations, because you can do whatever you want. The only thing you ever have to worry about leaving in a hot car is a pornographic videotape or a DQ cake, which you can eat, nude, walking around your apartment with nobody to traumatize if those awesome crunchy chocolate bits rain onto your private parts.\n\n You can (at least theoretically) have sex with whomever you want, too, and still enjoy the erotic, stultifying fear of being confronted with a new set of genitals.\n\n If you are, however, unhappily unmarried, there's a way to be you\u2014the last man standing\u2014and not be the worst:\n\n 1. Get a career you love and are happy with enough to want to do a whole bunch. The single people who I know who are the happiest are those who love their jobs in a totally not-sad way. You know the expression: Love what you do and you'll never make an online date with somebody who wears wraparound sunglasses on a foam cord, because maybe he's nice and it's just been so, so long.\n\n 2. If you can't or don't love your job, get and love a sexy hobby\u2014like one of those giant sails that you can use with a skateboard that they sell in SkyMall catalogues. Or, get really good with money and funnel it into something awesome and crazy, like zip-lining.\n\n 3. Most importantly, love your coupled-off, shacked-up, married friends. When they worry about you, or don't invite you to dinner parties, or get mad that you brought that perverted lesbian as your plus-one, they probably don't remember their halcyon, ice-cream-cake-in the-pubes days. They have smashed that frosted lotus in each other's faces. When they look at you with their head cocked to the side, and wonder if they \"know anybody for you,\" remember that it's coming from a good place. Your friends love you and want you to find a good home, just like an antique credenza or a sweet-natured pitbull with an expensive kind of blinding diabetes, who gets called Bumpy at the no-kill shelter, on account of him always running into things.\n\n 4. Don't get bitter. This is important. Here at Don't Be the Worst Industries, we recognize that being single can suck. We understand that wedding season can be a drain on the soul, the wallet, and a love for harp music that one once thought was depthless. But part of not being the worst is being happy for other people who have so successfully Not Been the Worst that they now never have to read another dating column for the rest of their lives, and can now spend their time doing things that bring them joy, like loving somebody else to the point of exquisite tolerance, and worrying about married people stuff. Like thread counts, life insurance, how the hell you're supposed to cook a ramp, and what the fuck a ramp is. And of course, the happiness of you, their friend, and whether to sit you with another kooky girl they'll have to decide is good enough for you for the duration of a dinner party.\n\n One day, you may be there, too."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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