Introduction

'So when are you two getting married?'

If I had a dollar for every time I have been asked this question by well-intentioned strangers,  malevolent  relatives  or people  who misapprehend  my most-pondered  choices for cocktail gossip, I would be writing this from my yacht in the Bahamas  as a swarthy Mediterranean waiter in a wisp of a sarong  serves me a Bloody Mary. For more years than was considered decent – eight to be exact – my Special Partner in Life and Love (SPILL) and I were not married. And there really was nothing wrong with us. We lived together. We loved one another. We had even been bold enough to spawn two children out of wedlock, much to the strain on my late grandmother's nerves, which  she took to remedying with a triple Scotch on the rocks. And though I have never been skinny enough to wear a body glove of a white satin gown, which blabs to all the world that I don't do g-strings, I had only one issue with being unmarried – I had no idea what to call him.

My boyfriend? (We were in our late thirties for god's sake). My partner? (Too business- like) My lover? (He didn't need any more encouragement) My de facto? (A little archaic, all that Latin). So I just referred to him as 'him'. You know, 'the guy I live with'. Don't think that stopped people from referring to me as Mrs Z – a fact which caused me to become absurdly irate. As if. I cannot abide the gendered assumption. Not to mention the indignity in losing half my name.

People would ask me, 'Why aren't you married?'  as if I had somehow misunderstood that if I wanted to live happily ever after, I ought to be. Despite rocketing divorce  rates to the contrary, we are taught that it is better to be married than to be single. That it is better to be married than divorced. That it is even better to be unhappily married than to live happily together with someone you love.

I just didn't want to get married.

If you can get over the historical baggage of marriage  as a proprietary  arrangement between  men  where one hands  over his  (presumed virginal) daughter  to another,  you immediately get ensnared in the over-commercialised birds' nest of bridal retail; and I'm not a frilly frock sort of gal to begin with. (I honestly don't give a rat's whisker if the serviettes match the flowers). And my own folks aside, frankly, I hadn't seen all that many happy marriages. Most marriages, a few years in, appear to be a particularly sadistic arrangement where two people stay together for every conceivable reason other than that they actually want to. Marriage all too often resembles a form of modernized, legalised domestic slavery. If I could have it my way, I'd also want someone to do my laundry, cook my dinner, clean my house and have sex with me whenever I felt like it. Everyone  needs a wife. But it's only those who pull the short straw who actually end up being the wife.

Then of course marriage is still, in some countries, a closed guild with entry reserved for heterosexuals only. Presuming you care about what your choices say about your values, isn't it morally dodgy to accept membership of a club which excludes people based on their sexuality? What sort of message does that send to my all my gay and lesbian friends?

But if I'm honest, politics and solidarity were only fractionally implicated in my reluctance to trudge up the aisle. My real reason had more to do with the way my throat closed when I thought about the weightiness of the commitment. All that loving and holding. In sickness and in health? 'til death do us part? I couldn't envisage myself – with a straight face, and without crossing my fingers behind my back – promising someone (anyone – not even Ralph Fiennes for that matter) that I would love him forever. I mean, we're talking about forever. It seemed so

... so ... unreasonable, so relentless. It would be truculent of me to ignore the fact that, over the years, I've changed my mind about things as fickle as hair-styles and fashion, not to mention taste in men. If I'd married that Marxist revolutionary ten years ago, or the lute-playing Peter Pan architect fourteen years ago, I'd have an impressive little treasure chest of wedding rings in my top drawer, not to mention maintenance claims up to my eyeballs.

I just want to be sure that I can keep my promises.

Then one day, I changed my mind. Just like that. I looked at this good patient man who had stood by my side for eight long hard years, who had fathered my two, variously, precious and precocious children, who had financially and emotionally supported me in migraine and in childbirth, and I found myself saying, 'I think I love you enough to marry you'. He spilled his beer down the front of his shirt. But – and he'll deny this of course – he got tears in his eyes.

So we tied the knot, barefoot under a tree in a park, surrounded by a handful  of friends. Though keeping my maiden name (as if I ever was a maid), hasn't deterred people from referring to me as Mrs Z, and I don't wear a wedding  ring, because it is a horrible  nuisance

when I am typing and we couldn't afford the white gold band that goes with all my silver

jewelry, I am happy to be married. Really. Despite all my previous misgivings.

But here's what I know for sure: I could not have done it unless and until I had done all the things I needed to do before getting married. At least I hope I have.

Depending on your take on long-term relationships, marriage is either a lottery or a work in progress. If like me, you prefer to hedge your bets, this is my list of 25 essential things to tick off before leaping off the ledge of singledom into the freefall of nuptial longevity.

1: Travel Alone

Straight after my final school exams, a couple of my female classmates found the first bloke they could and got married. Fifteen years later, I met up with one of them. She was a middle-aged woman (hair-do, sensible shoes and all) with teenage children. While I raced after my son in his bulging nappy and variously yanked him out of a fountain and retrieved his bottle from a German  shepherd's ear, she smiled a 'been-there-done-that'  grin and clucked, 'Children do grow up, you know'.

As I took in her Gucci handbag and sensible shoes, listened to her worn-out conversation about how to teach safe sex to adolescents while I was worrying  about potty training, I thought with pity, 'Yes, but have you ever had your passport stolen in Rome and had to flash your cleavage to an Italian official to get a new one?'

She had stepped into adulthood before she had stepped into life or off a plane. The way I saw it, she had traded the best years of her youth for a grown-up existence that would have been waiting for her five or even ten years later. She was getting married while I was getting laid. By the age of 24 she had had four kids while I had had four boyfriends in four different countries. She'd never left the neighbourhood, while I had never left a forwarding  address. I couldn't help wondering: what was the big hurry?

Why would you want to get married if you'd never had a stranger pay for your cappuccino in a piazza  in Rome while he teaches you to sing 'Whose Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?' in

Italian? I wanted to lug a backpack  up the footpaths of Kilamanjaro before I carried a posy. Would I have lived enough if I had never trawled marketplaces imagining I was going to be kidnapped for my internal organs or sold on the black market as a sex slave? Or tasted things people back home keep as pets?

I never experienced a freedom  as complete,  terrifying and soul-stripping  as the one I felt when I was cut loose from the moorings of my family, culture and upbringing. Suddenly it hit me like bird poo – that other people's opinions, influences and authority over me defined who I was and who I thought I was. Out there in the world all by myself, I discovered I was much more than a dutiful daughter and bitchy sister. I gave myself the surprise of my life by successfully negotiating my way from one place to the next, without speaking the language and with no money even though the last ferry had left and the next one was only due on Friday. I concluded that, though I am to quote my father, 'more gullible than Snow White,' I am perfectly capable of assessing whether  a stranger is going to cut me up into little pieces and feed me to his pet Rottweiler or is genuinely offering  me a bed for the night – without the strictures of my culturally-phobic 'stranger danger' attitudes.

In new places, I stretched myself. I stopped saying things like, 'I'd never eat ... dried fish, turtle brains or sheep's entrails. I learned that people who have little are much more ready to share than people who have much. I changed my mind about public transport as a medium  for humans only – goats and chickens make perfectly acceptable travel companions. They travel well, on the whole.

In moments of personal necessity, I reckon we become our best selves as we figure things out all on our own. Unhinged from all we know, we light up new synaptic pathways as we work out how to barter clothes for food or discover how delicious toasted termites are when we haven't eaten for two days. (Our culinary appreciation of the insect world may have lain dormant our whole lives.)

Everything weird and wonderful we've experienced becomes part of the bounty we offer in a relationship. Just think about it – living with someone for 'the rest of our lives' is going to test the limits of our boredom. But if our eyes have seen different sunsets and our hands have known new ways of touching (This is how Native Americans show affection) and our ears have heard songs and stories and drums from elsewhere, we'll be more interesting human beings for it. All the things we've known and experienced, all the people we have met on our journey, travel with us into the four corners of our marriage. At the very least they remind us

that the world is immense and that people love and live and hope and dream and die in many different places.

Who sits where at the wedding will not make or break the relationship, will it?

Want my advice? Put the Gucci handbags and sensible shoes on lay-by for now. Take a walk on the wild side before you take a walk down the aisle.

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