In Sex and the City, Carrie once said that ‘single women are the greatest enemies of married women’ while I myself began to realize that married women ARE the greatest enemies of single women. Hold on, my dear married girlfriends, I don’t have the slightest intention to judge you, nor am I in the position to hate you and the word ‘enemy’ carries no hostile connotation at all (trust me!) All I want to express is that I am deeply jealous and envious of you, of your fulfilled accomplishemnt in life —— the greatest accomplishment a girl could ever have in her life. Though I don’t hate you at all, I am definitely threatened by you.

This afternoon, after my class, I received an SMS from a distant friend. ‘Distant’ here means her number is on my contact list yet we never try to or bother to contact each other except for one or two rare occassions. What struck me was the content of the SMS : ‘Here is the good news: My lover and I have officially registered to be husband and wife today. You won’t receive our wedding invitation since we are planning to celebrate our marriage by travel. Please excuse us for not giving a banquet.’

OMG! My brain all of a sudden went blank. Feeling heavily dizzy and faint, I experienced a spasm of extreme restlessness. Holding my umbralla, under the hot sun, I had some difficulties to breathe for a minute or two. It was 35 ℃ and yet I was feeling cold and even trembling. How… How dare I not excuse you?! You are the happiest couple in the world today! The problem is, I am not a close friend of hers, why am I entitled to this notice? Although I knew for sure that she just sent the message to all the contact numbers in her phone indiscriminately, I couldn’t help but assume with evil intention that she wanted everyone on the earth (unmarried women, in particular) to envy her happiness. It was not until at this moment that I regretted so much my keeping her number. I hardly remembered how I dragged my lead-loaded legs back to my dormitory. All I remembered was that I was feeling dead. When I felt calmer, I replied to her, wishing her happiness with her husband ever (without a ‘fucking’) after and wishing them to have a baby as soon as possible (the worst translation of ‘早生贵子’ in history).

I try to recall my past experiences with her. I rememered a large group of friends having a great time in her house on the second day of Lunar New Year two years ago. She was treating us with foods and drinks and cards to play with hospitality. Yet another time, longer time ago, I was having a drink with her and another two girls in a café. she was sad as she had just broken up with her boyfriend and that bastard hurt her so much. I had been in her situation for a million times before and I felt obliged to rescue her poor soul. So I began to comfort her. It turned out that my disastrous dating experiences and the dozens of bastards I had ever met greatly astonished everyone of them and at the same time, made her very much relieved because she was not alone in a miserable life. Meanwhile, my perceptive analysis about relationship enlightened her so much that she nearly worshiped me. Their admiration for me and the consequent vanity surrounding me largely compensated my dark dating history. For a time, I even felt proud to have had those sad days which made my life so different. Then, here came her news of marriage and I suddenly realized that, the past years have brought her a husband and a marrige and the same past years have brought me nothing but more disatrous relationships and an even bleaker future.

When you are 26, you’ll find that when you woke up one day, everyone around you is getting married. It seems that all of them were dating secretly behind you and then they all suddenly popped into your eyes and the only thing they want to tell you is ‘I am married.’ Although I am not in a rush to get married, I hate everything that reminds me of the poor fact that I am running out of my time. My grandma keeps telling me these days that I am not a girl anymore and I should put ‘that thing’ onto my top agenda; my married girlfriends and their kids (my best friend’s kids are two years old now and she wishes me to get married before her son goes to primary school and I want her to spare me more time) are mouting my pressure and challenging the bottom line of my comfortability. To make matters worse, the very old fashioned saying (yet everyone still keeps saying it with or without a reason) that when a woman enters 30, she is doomed to be rejected whereas a man is still a rising sun, is haunting me day and night.

Do I want to get married? This is a question I myself cannot answer at the moment. I definitely need a man to love me wholeheartedly. But what if I have already had this man yet I cannot marry him? Or a marriage cannot promise a long-lasting love as it is supposed to do? Admited it or not, marriage is more about living together than loving a lifetime and the love for the opposite sex in a marriage, as everyone is complaining, will sooner or later turn into the love you have on your family members. I cannot imagine I will have the same kind of feeling towards my husband as to my father, though I know it is the most stupid and ridiculous analagy on earth. What I fear most is that, my husband will stop/feel no intereted in/get tired of fucking me soon after I give birth to our baby, which is not uncommon I can assure you. To marry is to compromise. The least thing I want to compromise is my love. So you see, I am still striking a balance between these two factors, just like a baby struggling on her feet to stand still.