It is Unmarried & Single Americans Week, and as it happens, it is also my birthday this week, which will commemorate another year I have lived on this earth as an unmarried & single person, along with every one of my fellow Jezebels (though Anna is sort of spoken for.) I have little hope of changing this status, for as anyone who is single will tell you, singledom is a self-perpetuating state that builds upon itself, like a "cycle" of violence, or the welfare state, or addiction, or depression; in fact, all of those things are probably related. When you're single, everyone you know is single; friends who marry drop away from your circle of drinking partners — and if they don't, they'll probably regain their singledom before long — and what's more, everyone you know is so highly preferable to anyone you would actually be allowed to date, and you couldn't date anyone you know, because it would be weird, and besides, last time that happened it totally ruined your friendship for a couple of weeks.
As you might be able to tell, I take some responsibility for my single status: the fact is that I — like most of my friends — have grown into a much more particular and specific and realistic person, which dovetails with the reasoning I received when I polled my buddy list as to why their single friends (and almost all their friends are single) were "still single." We are picky. We are romantic neocons who know too many people, too well; and even those rare occasions when we've loved too deeply have been too many times not to have grown something of an immunity to romance and its thoughtlessness; our last relationship was actually pretty great, until it wasn't; it set the bar too high; WHATEVER. Bottom line, yeah, we're all going to die, fairly soon, and we could very well die single; and today we're content with that. But yeah, we're in the minority here, right? Your single friends are constantly complaining about how single they are. So give it up: why are they single?