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It should have been delicious, but the kitchen gods were against her. The salad wilted. The dip was cold. And by the time the pasta arrived looking rather pink, Lily had had it. She spooned out each portion and, in the immaculate Park Avenue apartment of her perfectly married friend, just lost it.

Tears dripped onto a coordinating charger and dinner plate as she sobbed, "This is awful. It's all just awful," and scurried to the bathroom. The entire table looked at me. It's not about the pasta.

With regard to most aspects of our lives, my friends and I ran parallel races. We excelled in our careers at roughly the same pace. We shopped the same sample sales. But when it came to relationships, my friends had graduated college, and Lily and I were back at the middle-school dance. "Stairway to Heaven" was playing, couples were swaying, and for eight minutes and two seconds we would be alone. And. Everyone. Would. Know. It.

I opened the bathroom door and hugged the last single girl in the universe. "Maybe," she said tearfully, "It's time to quit book club."

Instead, we decided to ditch. Lily went "out of town." I sent my regrets and agreed to a date with a guy who was certainly not marriage material. As I flirted and sipped my vodka soda, I thought of the double-faced satin strapless fit-to-flair gown that was surely being discussed uptown. I ordered another cocktail and drank it, fast.

The following book club meeting had a scheduling snafu. Last minute cancellations started popping up at 3 o'clock, so I thought it would be rude not to go. The summer heat had forced us to abandon our apartments entirely. When I arrived at the chosen restaurant, it was down to three: two brides-to-be and me.

Dutifully, I played the single person, entertaining the girls with my standard dating disaster stories. At the time, the problem I liked to exaggerate most was the banker. He adored playing games and was never going to settle down, never going to be my boyfriend.

Anyone, everyone, knew this… which meant he had me on a string—pulling me in, driving me crazy, letting me out, hurting my pride. Just generally a bad idea. Everyone thought so. Except, as it turned out, the fiancées.

"Ooooh. The lost cause. I remember how fun that was," one of them said.

"There's nothing like that feeling of falling, really falling, for someone," the other added.

"Can you believe we're never going to do that again?"

I had to do a double take. A person's memory is a cagey thing. While I clearly recalled comforting the fiancées when they rejected the Wrong Ones and found the Right Ones, they'd now deluded themselves into thinking they'd had fun. And one day—if I managed to reprogram my Pavlovian nausea for certain ex-boyfriends' names—I might feel the same. Regardless, I would pretend to feel the same. Watch: Is Being Single More Fun?

Later that week, I had lunch with a college friend, my first to get married. I gasped when she told me that she was also going to be the first to leave her husband. I thought of the term that describes this phenomenon: starter marriage.