Impertinence makes me angry

At my brother's wedding three people asked me when I was going to get married, and at one level I felt rather good about this as it was precisely the number I had predicted when chatting to my brother beforehand. Of course on another level it annoyed me immensely -- not least because one of those times I was with my cousin Jo, who unlike me is rather keen on the whole getting married and sprogging up thing, and who is sensitive about her singleness.

It's amazing how often people will ask you these things. I brought my ex-boyfriend in to the first feast I ever went to in college, and a few weeks later at dinner one of the other fellows asked me why I hadn't married him. Which is some chutzpah if you ask me. I dislike it most when it happens in a religious context. I was about the only teenage girl I knew who didn't assume she was going to get married and make a home, and I expressed this opinion in my church youth group when I was about fifteen. The curate who led it thought me very strange but as a favour found for me a book he thought I'd like. It had a byline about "the increasing numbers of Christian women who through no fault of their own are finding themselves single". I smiled sweetly and said Thankyou. And I went on a retreat early this year where we all had to go up one by one to be prayed for, and when I went up the leader prayed for me "to love again". This was someone I had met two days before and hardly talked to since. He knew nothing about me (at least if he did he didn't get it from me). Unfortunately it was right at the end of the retreat so I couldn't work up the courage to ask him about it, and it made me boilingly furious for a couple of weeks. (This is the problem with the church: it's so often two steps forward, one and a half steps back.)

I'm thinking I ought to get proactive about it -- I need a good story in reserve, because hardly anyone who asks that sort of thing deserves a proper answer. Something like, I have vowed not to marry until the return of the true Stuart kings to the throne of England; or I can only marry the man who can solve this riddle: [need good riddle here, which is a bit of a drawback].