Must be in the water?

A year ago, all my friends were happily married and I thought I was about to join their blissful, nested ranks. What fools, we. Now three---count them, three-- of my very best friends are in the throes of major marital conflicts and I am in the extraordinarily twisted and bizarre position of advisor to the lovelorn. Even Alanis Morrissette couldn't come up with irony like this. Except it's not funny in the least, nor is it fun for any of the people involved. My friends are my family (well, my family is my family, but at least you get to choose your friends, and my friends are a lot easier to like than my family), and the only thing in the world that I wish for them is happiness of a scale that cannot be measured. What can I say--I'm fiercely loyal.

There's A, who's my best girlfriend from middle school. She met her husband in college and they got married at age 22. They were my first friends to get married, buy a house and have not one but two children who are so cute that they frequently reduce the most stubbornly unsentimental adults to cooing, rapturous idiocy. A's husband has always been a solid, dependable family man and they were rooted firmly enough in their domestic womb that I honestly thought they led the perfect married life. But now A is realizing that sex after 10 years together isn't what it was in college, and her husband has been spending all his free time building his new business, and suddenly A woke up one day and realized that she'd spent the past 10 years living her life for everyone but herself. Enter the couples therapist, stage left. My illusions of married life are being shatted in teeny, tiny bits, the kind that fall into your eyes and skew your vision for years to come.

R hooked up with her husband the same night I hooked up with my college boyfriend (actually, in the tent across the way from ours). Things didn't work out for me and my guy, but R and her husband dated all through college and grad school, lived together and then moved across country and got married. Now R is realizing that her hubby doesn't listen to her needs, and she feels like she'll never have exciting sex again. Enter individual therapist, stage right.

T was my college roommate and she met her husband right around the time when I met Glenn. They had a wild, whirlwind romance, a spectacular wedding by the ocean (which Glenn photographed beautifully) and then they moved to Germany so T's husband could do a post-doc in Hamburg. They basically got married, moved in together for the first time and moved to a foreign country where T had no job and didn't speak the language. The problems started forthwith. Somehow her husband morphed into Glenn's evil twin, complete with pre-marital activities with a grad student, except all this came to light post-wedding so she didn't have the option of vacating the premises without incurring legal complications.

What is going on:?????????????

Maybe men really are from Mars. Is is a generational aversion to responsibility? 50% of all marriages may end in divorce, but this is way out of control. These are the people we all knew would make it in the long run. R, T and A are amazing people who just want fulfilling relationships in which their needs are met. If that's too much to ask, then I'm sticking to life with cats. At least they don't complain when you put your cold feet on them in bed.

For the first time since last summer, I really, truly feel lucky to be single. I hate that this feeling comes at the expense of my friends' happiness.