the back-up plan

We're at that age now.
You know that time when you're about 16, and you start making the back-up plan to ensure you won't end up alone for the rest of your life? You don't actually think that you will ever really need to use a back-up... after all you're still a teenager and the world seems full of hopes and dreams that are about to come true, and you are one of those lucky ones who will surely find her great love. But you make the plan anyway, just to be on the safe side. You tell a friend or two that when you hit 28 (which we thought that was so old and far away) if none of you are attached, then you get married! And then you forget about it and only remember it at odd times when you want to laugh it off.
Then one day you wake up and you're 26. How did I get here so fast, I have no idea.
The other day, my sister witnessed a moment of sheer lunacy that has been stuck in my mind ever since she told me about it: My dad and a friend of his were talking, and the friend (a woman, in her early fifties) asks how old I am. He tells her, 26. And she says "Well! It's time to get her married!"
Notice how she says "get her married" as if it is a job for the general public. Oh my God, I'm at that age.
Already, when you hit 21, every time you're in the presence of a happily engaged couple or a newly married couple, or the ultimate worst, at a wedding, you hear the word "3abe'lik" a few dozen times. "3abe'lik," like your life's sole purpose should revolve around finding yourself that husband so that the world can rest and stop telling you that.
We're at that age when you look around at your friends and start speculating who will be the one to go first. Last year the poll would've probably pick me. The year before, it would've picked another couple who had been together six years. Now it seems that my back-up plan might be the first to go. How ironic is that?
Now we're at that age where the fear of ending up alone is kind of growing a little more. We're older now, seen what's out there, already have a friend of two with divorces of their resumes and your one serious relationship has gone to hell. It's a little scarier out there, I have to say. So you make new back-up plans. You and your gay best-friend decide to raise a child together at age 35. Or you and your girls decide you'll all live in a big house and adopt children from every country. You upped the age, of course, because you still want to give yourself a chance to find that shot at a nuclear family. But there's a slight chance the group of we-need-to-get-her-married parents are in for the shock of their lives.
Problem is, no one really wants the back-up plan. That's why it's called a back-up.
I've been accused of all kinds of things since I started writing this blog: angry, bitter, men-persecutor, revolted, negative, pessimistic... I've also very likely blown up all my chances of ever getting a man interested in me again... but even I can't help but hold on to the hope that I won't have to fall on the back-up. And even though the back-up plan might be a smarter-plan, I want the story you don't plan for at all.