Dear Tracy,

 I woke up this morning to your post "My terror of ending up an old cat lady."  I'll be honest, it sort of got my goat.   I started grumbling before I even read the post.  In my head I'm thinking 26?  and OH MY GOD SINGLE?  Teh worldz coming to an end!!!  And it was sort of hard too, because you're one of my favorite Broadsheet writers and you seem pretty feminist, and goddamn if I don't need more feminists around.  

 However, my bleary-eyed early morning judgment fest was cut short as I started to read your column.  Ok, you just ended a long-term relationship with someone you still care about, and you're masochistically reading Lori Gottlieb?  Girl, sounds like a rough week.   No wonder you're scared of dying alone.

 As a 26-year old single girl myself, I can relate.  I don't know where you live, but I'm pretty sure that living in Salt Lake City, Utah, land of the early-Mormon-marriage culture, I've pretty much got you beat in terms of cultural guilt surrounding singlehood.  The prophet Brigham Young who founded this bustling marriage-utopia declared that "any man not married by age 25 is a menace to society."  If he was that hard on the men, you can probably imagine how much it ups the ante to be single and have a vagina.  An unmarried woman over 23 in this town starts to get the pitying looks and the worried whispers.  And I'm not even Mormon!  

 I've often thought about how interesting it is to be a feminist in a culture that unequivocally reinforces non-feminist value systems.  As much as you and I might both rally around reproductive rights and decry the rampant sexism endemic to pop-culture, government, religion, etc., sometimes it's kind of scary to be on the strong, outspoken, independent side of things huh?  Sometimes, the thought creeps in, "what if they're all right?"  All those people who say that I should just "Marry Him"?  What if, like Bridget Jones, I'll realize that the truth is, if I don't DO SOMETHING (aka get married), I'll "die, fat and alone, listening to sad FM for the over 30's"?  

 Lady, we all have those thoughts.  And it's cool.  Sometimes you just need someone to tell you to wake up.  

 So wake up!  Put down the Lori Gottlieb for gods sake!  Go for a hike or plan a vacation with friends or go find a marvelously good book that doesn't involve any sort of tripe romance.  (100 Years of Solitude perhaps?  I'm totally kidding.  Good book though)   

 In the end, we are all alone.  The person you will always have to live with is yourself.  And that's not some stupid New Age bullshit I'm saying to try to help you feel better.  It's just you, from moment to moment.  And sometimes there are other people and sometimes there aren't.  But you have a job I would kill for, and a brilliant mind, and lots of people who support you.   Studies have shown that there isn't a significant difference between elderly women who never married and elderly women who have married, in terms of happiness.  What DOES make a difference in later-life happiness are social connections and financial security.  So beef up on your friendships and put money in your 401K.  Life's too short to buy a cat. 

 Hugs,

 R