I remember how thrilled I was the first time I referred out loud to R as “my husband.” It was on our honeymoon, which took place in the Pacific Northwest. We took a red-eye flight to Seattle the day after our wedding and arrived early in the morning, completely exhausted. Our reserved room at the B&B wasn’t available until the afternoon and we were simply too tired to function, so we checked into a motel for a four-hour nap.

I was at the front desk, drowsily arranging for the room, and couldn’t resist mentioning that my husband was parking the car, even though the desk clerk hadn’t asked and didn’t care. When R entered the lobby, I announced “oh, look, here’s my husband now. Why, I guess he parked the car successfully, that husband of mine.”

I may as well have been wearing a Cinderella costume, such a dorky Disney princess was I, so out-of-my-mind delighted to have become a wife, and before the age-30 deadline too! Sure, I was raised in the 1970s, but Gloria Steinem could eat my veil. I had married for love, but I was also proud in a weird 1950s kind of way. My childhood had been difficult and sad and I’d always felt on the outside, always envied the “normal” families. Marriage made me part of the status quo, legitimate and safe.

Fast forward to the present: I’m sitting on a bar stool drinking Sauvignon Blanc with my friend, recounting my latest dating adventure and secretly feeling sorry for her because she’s a wife with a husband and a long marriage. This was during my BDF (brief dating frenzy), when I crossed over to the other side and became convinced that long term marriage was an insane idea, a bogus concept, an anthropological abnormality.

Suddenly, instead of envying my cozily-married friends and longing for my old life with R, I pitied my pals, who, I noticed, had a kind of glazed, trapped look in their eyes. How tragic that they couldn’t flirt and date and pursue reckless abandon like I could! Hell, I was the lucky one, the one to envy. I had to stop myself from blurting, “Do yourself a favor and get out now, before the chin hairs start to multiply.”

My married friends were fascinated by me and hungry for updates. The morning after a date, I’d wake up to emails asking  “SO??” “Did you have fun? Where’d you go, what did you do?”  There was frequent use of the word “vicarious.”

But then we already knew that–right?–that the single grass seems greener to the married sometimes and that most people in long exclusive relationships ache for a break from that exclusivity.

I don’t know what the answer is. My BDF died down– to the great disappointment of my friends–and I’m confused all over again. I still believe that long term marriage is, in general, a dicey proposition, but I am not at all convinced that it’s a gift to be a single gal in her mid 40s.  Sometimes I’d kill to be able to say “oh, look, here’s my husband, home for dinner.”