My unmarried man's soliloquy: circa January 2010 (told from a second person point of view):

You are the proverbial last leaf on a tree. The most recent of your straight single friends to marry was five years ago. You are on the less glamorous side of the over and under so far as the age 30 line goes and you are starting to creep closer to the big Four Oh. The blizzard of bachelor, rehearsal dinner, and wedding party invitations you received in the mail in your mid twenties is far enough in the past that for all you know announcements to these functions are now delivered through evites.

You used to scoff at the parade of your woman friends and ex-girlfriends who said you had commitment issues. It sounded like an uninformed Bronx cheer to you. “If you dated some of these mentally unbalanced women I’ve been with in my life, you wouldn’t have gotten married either” was your utterly confident and more than a little smug retort to them. The line had the benefit of being convenient and true at the same time. In your dating history you unintentionally attracted more than your share of women with bipolar and borderline personality disorder and once even multiple personality disorder issues. So that was the true part. The convenient part was you could just keep dating and dating and dating and you didn’t have to face the hard choices that come with commitment.

Until you met her. The person you are with now. She is a wonderful, kind hearted, and generous person. She actually loves you for the real you, not some distorted impression of you. You know she is more than you deserve. You love her back and more than that, you can honestly say you are actually in love with her. And she is not in any way crazy. The obliteration of your old excuse unsettles you. Why do you hesitate to give her what she has told you she wants? The other evening you both went to a bar with friends and she wound up drinking too much. By the end of the night her voice was slurred as she started asking you if you really love her and if you did, why wouldn’t you marry her? Great, every long in the tooth bachelor’s idea of a good time: arguing with their drunk girlfriend about why they haven’t gotten married yet.

But deep down inside, you know that you should. And you know if you don’t, if you let let this girl slip away, you will end up living a life filled with “what ifs” and “why didn’t I’s” and the only thing you will be able to respond with is an endless march of variations on I could have, I would have, I should have.

So there you are. And there she is. All you have to do is reach.

Postscript:

In 2011, I reached.