Every time someone I know gets married it kicks off marriage related topics in my little head. I was just thinking about how a year and a half ago there were four of us engaged women at Ed & Ineke's wedding and none of us wanted to catch the bouquet. Clearly that speaks for itself. In the end, the bouquet got tossed twice and I only ended up with it out of pity for everyone involved in the whole affair -- the poor scared girls that didn't want to touch the thing (including me) and the poor bride who had to toss the thing twice.

So why didn't any of us want the bouquet? One of us was just gun shy about marriage -- she ended up happily married (just recently). One of us is unhappily married. Two of us quickly disentangled ourselves from our pending commitment errors -- one of us at the very wedding where the unenthusiastic bouquet toss took place.

Every time I hang out with my friends lately, I find myself wondering how much of their relationship status affects mine. I'll bet that if they were all single, I would probably be more inclined to stay so. Not to say that I'm in a relationship just because my friends are, but that their lives, given our closeness, can't but affect me to some degree. I see their intimacy and happiness, and their flaws and strains, and my gut no longer recoils from it -- the thought of spending forever with one person (or at least the foreseeable future) -- in fact it seems potentially worth giving up my freedom for.