The obvious question now is, Why no marriage for me yet? Had I remained in my hometown of Chicago, it's possible I'd be a married man by now. When I was in high school, I imagined that I would be off the market by age 27. After college, my priorities shifted, and forging a successful career became my sole purpose. While there have been a series of girlfriends, a few of them serious, and maybe two of whom I could have seen myself marrying, the idea of marriage wasn't something that was top-of-mind for me. In pursuit of a career, I had forsaken the fundamental male necessity of long-term female companionship. A relationship would end, and I'd pour myself into work; in retrospect, this hasn't been as rewarding and fulfilling as I once believed. I was spending entirely too much effort trying to define myself by my work, and as I sit here at the tail end of 30something—embarking on mid-career and middle age—I'm finding that a fruitful life is about so much more.

There's that tired old cliché about the older, single woman with the cats and the stack of old newspapers living in a tiny apartment in the big city. Sometimes I wonder if I'm en route to being the male equivalent: Aging, increasingly craggy and particular, losing hair, and having intimate, one-way conversations with whichever blathering blowhard is screaming political spin at me from my TV screen. My cooking skills would be no better than those of a Boy Scout: mac n' cheese, polska kielbasa, and frozen veggies (hey, it's a balanced, albeit processed, meal). I would binge on DVDs of Nip/Tuck and Battlestar Galactica, my girlfriends growing increasingly digital. A sad, sad proposition.

But enough with the woe. There are worse situations I could find myself in. I could be searching desperately for food and potable water in the hinterlands of Tanzania. It would be foolish of me to take this time for granted, because the sleep 'til noon, brunch-free, NFL-fueled sundays of today are likely to be my errand-filled, weekend-long shopping fests of tomorrow. While I might be stumbling home after much-needed drinks at 3 am tonight, I might be stumbling out of bed at 3 am to administer much-needed diaper changes for my future kid tomorrow.

There will, eventually, be the moment where I swallow my pride, bite the proverbial bullet, and ask for a woman to join me in holy matrimony. The day will come when I'm properly seasoned, where my particular vintage has matured, and where I feel that I am man enough to take the plunge. The measure of a man can be tallied in numerous ways, but when all is said and done, I would want my manhood judged, in part, by the sort of family I helped raise, the type of legacy I've left for them and the sort of values I handed down to them. It's just the natural order of things and, in time, I'll come around.