In elementary school, my best friend and I played elaborate games of dress-up involving our mothers’ cast-off clothes and shoes, and when I look back at some of the scenarios we imagined ourselves inhabiting, I can’t believe our parents didn’t have us committed. We locked ourselves in the closet with a box of Fig Newtons and a cassette player and recorded ourselves being eaten by sharks during a “live radio broadcast.” We fashioned crowns out of pillows, swim fins, construction paper, and coat hangers; strapping our crowns onto our heads, we mounted the swingset in my backyard and yelled, “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” and swashbuckled down the slide waving tree branches. We climbed a neighbor’s tree, and when he asked rather testily what we thought we were doing dangling from branches on his property, we responded calmly, “Agents Bunting and Weiss, Squirrel Central Intelligence.” We dressed my four-year-old brother in an old nightie and referred to him as “Anne, the faithful servant girl.” And always we awaited the return of our absent husbands, the deposed princes that languished in faraway prisons while we patiently harvested every blade of onion grass in my backyard and argued over who got to wear the lace-up shoes. The princes, who bore a suspicious resemblance to either Andy Gibb or the lead singer of Rush, slipped their shackles to write us the occasional mash note, but when we stuffed basketballs under our clothes and lumbered around yelling, “My water just broke! Send Anne, the faithful servant girl, for towels and hot water! And tell her to bring more Newtons of Fig as well, forsooth, mayhap, wherefore,” we gave birth to perfectly formed sporting equipment alone.

I don’t know why we felt the need of imaginary husbands. True, the husbands made the occasional appearance, usually in the form of a pillow, which we kissed passionately before bidding the phantom hubby farewell as he set out on yet another crusade, but we didn’t really require them for our stories. We became pirates, code-breakers, movie stars, intrepid explorers, world-class physicians (“Anne, the faithful servant girl, has contracted the dreaded polka fever which has no cure! Dr. Weiss will test Anne’s glass of Hawaiian Punch for further contamination while I make the first incision. Lie still, dumbhead”), deep-sea divers, bicycle aerialists, and cultural commentators. We didn’t bother to include our husbands in our adventures after the obligatory mention of their existence – after all, we had Anne to carry our luggage – but we never failed to make that mention.

The average eight-year-old has only the vaguest grasp of the fine points of matrimony, and since both my best friend and I grew up in two-parent households, we probably figured that a grown woman has to have a husband, so we too would have husbands, technically, and just ignore irritating details like love and sex and arguments over money. Not until we began reading Judy Blume did we begin to see the big picture, and once we graduated to the naughty parts of The Thorn Birds (and started inflicting them on our Barbies), husbands per se grew less and less important to the plots we devised, and lovers took over. Besides, my Ken doll died in a tragic storm-drain surfing accident, so we had to improvise by giving one of the less overtly feminine Barbies a butch haircut and dressing her in Ken’s clothes, which not only made us de facto inventors of “the baggy look,” but also led to significant difficulty in simulating sexual intercourse between Barbie and “Ken,” and I won’t even get into the fact that we had only one “Ken” and about a dozen Barbies, all of whom therefore had to endure systematic and anatomically hopeless deflowering by a drag king in Western wear while simultaneously dying of tuberculosis and performing in gymnastics competitions, and I should probably make a short film about this and call it Ken Or Kenda and then begin a lifetime of psychoanalysis as quickly as possible.

Whether this youthful experiment with gender-bending led to my current attitude about marriage, I have no idea, but the older I get, the less ready for marriage I feel. Friends and classmates have started getting married willy-nilly, but the idea of getting married myself does nothing for me. Strangely, now that marriage constitutes a feasible idea – I have a boyfriend, and I turn 25 in March, not too young by any means – I can’t imagine any idea more wrong-headed. Perhaps I suffer from arrested development; perhaps I still cherish the hope that The One For Me wanders the earth looking for me; perhaps I just can’t cope with joint checking, but I don’t feel old enough or mature enough to get married. I don’t feel ready. I sometimes feel as if I escaped from eighth grade and nobody has caught on yet, and one day my homeroom teacher will find me at my job and stand next to my desk with her arms folded and say, “Nice try, Sarah. Now put those braces back on and come with me.” How can an eighth-grader introduce a man as her husband?

My childhood friend and I performed numerous marriage ceremonies as part of our play. We designed our dresses, we arranged the flowers, we practiced and processed and sang the wedding march. Planning an actual wedding poses many more problems and hassles – auditioning organists, tasting different kinds of cake, reserving a church months or years in advance, fighting with my mother over napkins and invitations, deciding whether I should change my name, choosing a menu, finding a dress, picking bridesmaids, finding dresses for the bridesmaids, registering for gifts, writing thank-you notes for the gifts, returning the gifts, and then of course that minor detail, committing myself to one person, for life, in front of everyone we both know. Call me impatient and lazy, but I would rather elope. If people want to have a party for us and give us presents, great. Let them organize it.

I went out for a drink this week with Maria José;, and we made a list out loud of all the women in our high-school class that had gotten married. Out of 48 girls, almost a quarter of us have already gotten married. A couple have gotten divorced. A bunch of them have kids. (Keep in mind, we went to an all-girls’ school, and by our calculations only 5 of us had lost our virginity as of our graduation.) Maria José; wailed, “Are we the only single ones left? What is wrong with us?” In response, I resurrected our long-standing joke about our reserved rockers on the front porch of the Golden Years Home For Spinsters And Their Cats, but I don’t really think we have anything wrong with us. Some of the women we went to school with viewed marriage as the lofty peak to which we should all aspire, others as a means to the end of wealth, but I want to hold out for true love. I love the Disco Biscuit, and I feel pretty sure that he loves me back, but I view marriage as a lasting commitment, and I would like to do better than “pretty sure.” If I measured my worth by my attachment to a man, I would have something wrong with me, and while I would like to get married someday, that day has not yet arrived.

But if it does, I have one word for the Biscuit, and one word only: Tiffany’s.

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