erica saves the day — It occurred to me that we, the post–Sex and the City generation, are sort of stuck. How are we supposed to know if we are unmarried because we want to be? As an unmarried 30-something woman in New York, you can’t say you want to get married, because then you’re that unmarried 30-something woman in New York who’s obsessed with marriage. But if you go around saying you don’t want to get married, people think you’re lying, or that you’re so traumatized by your past dating experiences that you must hate men. (Perhaps related: Most of my friends were completely captivated by Ariel Levy’s story in The New Yorker last week about the Van Dykes, the roaming pack of separatist lesbians. But today I think we’re all afraid we’d end up like Ruth on Six Feet Under, when she thinks her friends are serious about starting a women-only compound in Topanga.)