The problem I have and this is not a new complaint (though I hope to elaborate from a fresh perspective) is that single people are considered social outcasts. Society in our Westernized culture has two great goals in life: love and money. We are required to possess at least one of these so-called virtues if we are to be included in the social fold. I am not here to talk about money; I am here to talk about this need people have to fall in love.

I have never been in love.

I also had a perambulatory childhood fraught with bad memories and a fractured family. Are these two points related? I have certainly been forced to consider this, from friends, relatives and shrinks alike. Does it matter? Absolutely not. I must be lucky – it becomes increasingly apparent to me that I do not think quite along the same lines as my peers. I am here to withstand and conquer all that man suggests I ought to be. I am here to risk it all for a purpose without conclusion and some faint glimmer of a universal truth that can be unearthed and change a person’s life in one perfect sentence. I'm here, basically, to write.

At an early age I took up writing and for reasons that still mystify me I’ve remained over the years unwilling to stop at any cost. I have written myself out of the trauma of high school, the identity crisis of college, the Plan B, the shitty retail jobs, the alcoholic year, the unrequited loves and… well, you get the picture. Writing has kept me sane and more than that it’s kept me alive, giving me a reason to stop hating my faults and bad decisions and distracting my mind long enough to develop a skill. While I have been writing, those around me have fallen in love, gotten married and had babies. Hurray for the human race.

At a recent wedding, the MC asked at the beginning of the night for the single men to stand up and break the ice. Two did, they were obviously sad and desperate. Following this painful display, the single females were asked to rise. Upon the insistence of my married friends – who damn near raised me on their shoulders like I’d saved the day in a scrimmage match – I stood up awkward and shy, unpleasantly surprised to find the only other woman in the 100+ crowd to rise was a token lesbian. She met my humiliated gaze with a none too subtle gun-shot wave and an expression that seemed to say she’d be watching me for the remainder of the night.

I am not a lesbian and relieved to know this as a truth. Based on facts alone I probably should be, since I’d never had a boyfriend growing up. And truthfully I struggled for years with sexual identity, figuring the odds were insisting I was barking up the wrong trees and only through a drawn-out process of self-actualization have I come to understand that I do not fit any mold or label, I am simply too willful to develop any forever-type statements. But for a while I believed society knew me better and had the right to judge.

I have no experience with love simply because it has never been on my list of things to do, although I have loved deeply and unrequitedly for as long as I can remember. Obsession has been a hobby about as productive as a heroin habit. The male friends I have are few.

There is one friend, Conrad, I’ve known for years and only meet up with at weddings. We dated in Grade 6 for three days before I broke up with him over the phone in front of my tight-knit group of friends. I wanted to be popular on my own, not as a couple.

Platonic interests reigned supreme in my world back in middle school and true to form I spent months co-writing a short story with an eccentric friend, entitled, “Me, God and My Glad Garbage Bag,” that was passed amongst my peers whose jaws dropped at its obscene edginess. From here on I gave into writing like a desperate virgin and tasted nothing as sweet, scoffing chocolate and boyfriends for this surrender to word play.

Boys meant nothing to me besides inexplicable nervousness and indecision; words loved me harder than any palpable reality. Over the years I slept with one or two men, here and there. None of them meant more to me than the one I dedicated a book to, so I only made sense too keep writing even past the heart ache of an imaginary happy ending.

Back to the wedding. Over the years since graduation, Conrad and I have remained great friends, a consequence maintained by the amount of weddings we’d been attending together in a shockingly short period of time. The previous wedding on Vancouver Island we attended together out of sheer economics. He flew into Vancouver and rented a car, picking me up on the way to our destination.

We had always been extraordinarily capable of friendship and this wedding proved no different. Once across the straight and off the ferry we proceeded to mangle ourselves so lost we were nearly late for a wedding in a town of 1,500 - despite the fact we arrived three hours early. At one point we were so out to lunch we momentarily forgot we were actually on a time schedule and stopped at a rest area to take a picture of our moment together – hair sideways in the wind, sprawling driftwood peppering the sandy beach of the ocean behind us. For a delusional moment in this time, I considered what Conrad would be like as a boyfriend and was ultimately grateful our lives were so separate I would never find out.

At an information booth situated between trees so thick on either side of the highway it was like traversing the plane of a green tube sock, we parked and entered the tourist shack, in the hopes of figuring out once and for all where the hell we were and where we had to get to. All we knew at this point was that we were on Vancouver Island. Conrad explained to the woman over the counter the directions for the church in Parksville.

Unbeknownst to us we were long gone from our destination and to guide us, the tourist lady kindly pulled out a black jiffy marker with a desk-sized map of the surrounding area. She blithely swiped the tip of the pen across the line that indicated the highway, retracing our steps until she hit the end of the page, at which point she enthusiastically ripped off the entire piece of paper and continued scrawling her marker across the fresh page beneath. She did this twice more, at which pint Conrad was rubbing his temples, trying to blame me for being a bad navigator. Just because I put some make-up on in the passenger mirror to save time in case it really was going to take us over three hours to get to the wedding.

Back on the highway Conrad grew agitated to a point at which I could not ignore his change in behaviour.

“What’s wrong with you?!” I asked, confronting his odd expression. He was silent and grimacing like the Grinch in his “three sizes too small” phase.

“I have to punish the toilet,” he said, so matter of fact it sounded as though each word was its own sentence: I. Have. To. Punish. The. Toilet.

This of course caused me so much immediate amusement I ended up having a giggle fit, which only made his situation worse and he swore at me to stop laughing and watch for a gas station. We drove quickly down some endless and abandoned country road, which only made his obvious discomfort all the more hysterical. He has always made me laugh, but a sense of humor is not always enough. Laughing is no answer; it is only foreplay to a deeper meaning.

I have never had much patience in figuring out how to be girlfriend. Instead, unrequited love is my forte. I love because I want to be consumed and since I have not found mutual companionship I have chosen difficult paths, which explains one true behavioural pattern throughout my life: my failure in follow-through. I have used-up that resource to complete stories, I would never replace a moment with these keys for skin, no matter how tempting.

Since my Gone with the Wind days I have believed in true love, only now after countless frogs do I consider true love a false sense of security. I remember now, all these years later, that Scarlett never had a happy ending and Rhett tortured her from the bitter start. It’s a nice idea but mutual love is shockingly difficult to find, there seems always to be one who can not get enough, who thinks they have found all they have ever wanted. There will always be settlers, just as there will always be gunslingers and loose panties.

Despite the impossibility of escaping attraction, I am no longer convinced a man can make me happy and as bitter as this may sound I grow more willing over the years to accept the notion that love is not the only solution to being alive. Maybe I’m grasping at straws, it’s a possibility, but so is the idea that passion supersedes love and can in fact replace it if one is determined to follow a calling. I no longer believe everyone has ambition inside themselves; I’ve met too many talented people incapable of dogged perseverance.

I have dated many kinds of men and appreciate them all for the windows into strange worlds I would never be able to create from my own imagination. Each failed attempt to mold my beliefs into a reconciliation with the system of “settling down” as it is outlined in the unwritten guideline to preconceived accomplishment (white house and picket fence, etc.) has left me only more acutely determined to buck the system.

I am here to record my experiences for independent posterity – for the sake of freedom and more importantly the art that derives from loneliness like a spider web refusing destruction from the weather. I want to live forever. I want to live as long as there are sheets of paper and eyes in need of solace from strange misunderstandings.

I am not wishing to end up alone, but if I am a spinster I will be a productive one. Creation of will, when harnessed for good, is equal to the greatness bestowed by society upon a family or accumulation of wealth. Babies create a universal heart beat. Art creates rhythm for the melody of murmurs.

Certainly, this case of art vs. family will be argued for eternity by both sides and it must, as all wishes and wants and choices are relative. I doubt there are mothers in the world who would accept the idea that I can be happy without a child. But she is not right; she must understand that she is not right, as much as I accept I am not right about my own insistence. Procreation is a marvel and a feat. I do not seek to change minds on this matter. I only want the sympathetic looks and shoulder pats with regards to my lack of domestic complacency to stop. If I were to follow in my own mother’s footsteps and get pregnant at 26, I would be holding a toddler on my hip right now (As it was, I became so paranoid throughout that year of my life that I finally succumbed to birth control even though I was not sleeping with anyone.)

This Northern wedding – after Parksville and marking my fifth view of the aisle in three years – was the first one I’d been to where I found myself in the spot light – I’d gotten away with incognito and under the radar because there was always one of my five friends gearing up for their big day; asking advice, talking shop like a bunch of sorority alumni. This time, I was the only unmarried girl left. The husband of one of my friends took it upon himself to try and make me feel better. “Don’t worry, Emily. I have a feeling this is your year.”

Shoulder pat. Sympathetic gaze.

I gave him a, “I can only hope” expression; amazed people were actually going out of their way to pity me. Did they not see my obvious sarcasm and satire of a lonely bridesmaid? Worse, did they think I was joking only to hide the pain?

Is it not enough to keep me from movie and cell phone discounts because I didn’t have a significant other? Did these ignorant couples also feel it necessary to try and make me feel bad for choosing both sides of the bed over a white dress and co-ownership?

My friend Caroline’s husband told me that night that it was hard too for guys to accept a relationship. Yet from a husband’s point of view his point was, basically, moot. Yes relationships are hard but he still chose to have one and I still choose to keep to myself. Would it be fair to pat him on the shoulder with a sad eye and tell him, “Sorry for the loss of yourself”?

After the wedding night, Conrad threw a reunion party at his new house and within an hour I discovered that everyone I had grown up with was married, engaged or pregnant. Inside the house, snow piling against the windows like a dry-ice blow torch, I bumped against forgotten memories of fleeting friendship, amazed when I overheard that Phil Ecklon was engaged. Phil was the high school, dirt bag cowboy who had always been too short and squat to make an impression on most women. Phil Ecklon even beat me at this game – or I should say, upped his stakes to a 50 per cent chance of winning.

This is what couples can fail to understand – their happiness is not my loss. This game of partnering up has the success rate of an Indie Canadian band. At the end of the day you stick by your right to follow your heart and I stick by my right to chase its suggestion of a trail slightly more hidden from the highway. Yes, you could say I have chosen a career over a relationship and you would make a valid point based on the evidence outlined in these pages but that’s not the point.

Unfortunately, friendship is hard to give from those who find themselves committed to people rather than ideas. Marrieds just don’t appreciate the creative artist’s solitary endeavour; it goes against the principals of marriage. So the artists remain mired in poor self-esteem, solitary anxiety and a desperate, almost feverish desire to be remembered and ultimately crippling our ability to blend in. We’ll never blend in – we will forever be standing in solidarity amongst seated wedding guests.

Conrad and I joked the whole night at the reunion party about hooking up because we were the only two singles left in our large and eclectic group of friends. Imagine, only two of us from our grad class who were not in a committed relationship! It seemed bizarre to me that I was suddenly the anomaly when in high school and even in my 20s, being single was normal enough to slide by the edges of wedding album pictures unnoticed and even – in the right light – envied.

At the end of the night, Conrad wanted to keep fueling and suggested to me, under his breath, that we go back to his place and continue drinking. I had been on a sexual sabbatical for seven months by then and agreed to his drunken invitation through half-mast eyelids. Five minutes later as I stumbled into my boots at the doorway, trying to explain to the marrieds why I wasn’t going home with them, Conrad changed his mind and said he was too tired to continue partying. He did admit with a hot breath against my ear that I was his favorite person. For better or for worse we would never have each other. This remains my most successful relationship.

In the end, I'm grateful to Conrad for his insight into our inebriation and his willingness to be the responsible one. To keep our friendship as sacred as it had developed over the years, a rare a strangely relieving relationship if only for its rigidly platonic persistence. He was and will be a history, not nothing but more some kind of hybrid-friend. When I left his party we went our separate ways for the final time – Conrad and I will never again be at the same wedding, curious since we’d spent more time together in those three years of ring exchanges than we ever did during high school.

The final wedding was fitting to an end of blissful pair-offs and after a very brief ceremony my last engaged friend was vowed and true to our form we the high school five forced ourselves as a collective to the microphone to embarrass the bride. It was tradition and it united us in one last farewell. I did cry because I am not heartless. Nor am I unwilling to appreciate the joy in loving someone. Creating a family is profound but so too is the formulation of art and the drive of artists. Perspectives and truths are priceless and few have the chance to say something indelible; this responsibility is left to those who seek it exclusively. Fine by me if you do not seek this comfort, less competition.