Saturday nights can be a strange affair when you are a single thirty-one year old. Especially when your contemporaries are generally preoccupied doing adult stuff in couples. This might make me sound lonely but I always have the option to find younger friends to have a hedonistic time on the town with. But personally I never feel much inclined for big nights out in nightclubs and the lark. At my age, the financial and physical strains are simply too much to bear. It seems whichever way I turn, the Saturday night always promises so much, but delivers so little. So sometimes I end up spending the weekend feeling like an old bit of driftwood washed up on the shore of a wasteland, with no-where to go and no-one to be with.
I remember once at work, I obliged a hall viewing for an almost painfully pretty woman, the type so angelic that she almost makes one weep into your lonely pillow at night. Sadly (or happily) she was scheduled for an arranged marriage and wished to find a venue to hold the reception, hence the pretext of her visit. I always used to have an ideological discomfort with the concept of the arranged marriage. This wasn’t a specific cultural unease at the obligations of Hindu caste (it was also common practise in European aristocracy, whilst “shotgun” weddings are still commonplace in contemporary society), more that the fundamental principle of marital coercion seemed like an attack on liberty. As I’ve got older, I can't help but appreciate certain benefits to the arranged marriage. Especially on nights like tonight. In a few weeks time, some lucky bleeder will be spending every Saturday night with that angelic woman, and he won’t even have to go through all that kerfuffle woo-ing her with wit, charm and vast quantities of Blue WKD. They will just be together and he can take as lazy approach as he likes. And me, a criminally lazy woolly liberal, will most likely be sitting here alone, typing another slightly self-pitying blog entry before engaging in act of teary-eyed onanism.
So which of us seems the most liberated now?
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