Q: I’m single and feeling a lot of weird vibes about it. I thought the pressure to get married was a thing of the past, and now I find I’m fielding endless questions about why a great gal like me doesn’t have a guy. It’s making me uncomfortable. What’s the deal with this?
A: The deal is, however far we think we’ve come, the culture is way behind. (Think of all that nonsense about “real” Americans, and how retro and ignorant the thinking is!) The only way to deal with questions about your love status is, first, to keep annoyance at bay and, next, give a truly goofy answer. “Madonna’s psychic told me to stay single–and you know how brilliant HE is!” ought to do it. (“He is? Where did you meet him?” See? subject closed.) Or, “Well, I’ve had two marriages in my other lifetimes, and they just didn’t make me happy.” You get the idea. The point is not to make sense–it’s to disarm the person asking such a dopey question in the first place and get the subject moving in another direction. Anyone you don’t know intimately who wants to know why you do anything that you do deserves as bizarre and confusing an answer as you can muster.