I am a terrible evangelist. I was raised Catholic in an era when the Church was doing okay financially and spiritually and hadn’t yet encased itself in that patina of desperation and political authoritarianism, hadn’t yet asked its members to impose themselves on anyone. Even then, I couldn’t muster the small amount of proselytizing energy required by my faith—the ability to project it confidently—so I gave it up. I have more observations than opinions. I once interned at a magazine full of smart people (and a few dumb ones) collectively bursting with so many opinions that I became a nervous, anxious wreck every time I walked in the door. It didn’t help that the office was literally a hive: two floors with almost circular hallways along the periphery, with a spiral staircase going up the open middle. The constant need to generate opinions exhausted me; in truth, I cared passionately about a very small number of issues, and felt better suited to quiet explorations of those issues through reporting than I did to shouted polemics. Later, that magazine’s most vaunted (male) in-house writer would go on to explain their nagging gender imbalance by writing, “Confidence in one’s opinions and a willingness to engage in intellectual combat are disproportionately (though not, of course, exclusively) male traits,” which necessarily handicaps women at a magazine that “represents the top of the opinion writing totem pole.” But that is another story altogether.

Anyway, there is only one institution that I’ve bought into, which is marriage. But it is a strange institution, one without community. When a person performs religion or politics alone, we call him a nutjob, a conspiracy theorist, a schizophrenic. When two people agree to perform life alone, together, we call it the fucking backbone of society. It’s very strange.

Of course, many of my friends would disagree, and they’re right: there is a community of marriage. It is the club that makes the 37-year-old woman who just came back from maternity leave, with whom you’ve never been particularly close, notice your left hand for the first time and say, “My, that’s a pretty ring.” The club that says she can start talking to you more after that. It is the institution that makes it OK for your boss’s boss’s boss (are there even enough possessives for how important she is?)—the one who after a peremptory interview hired you only a year before, when you were 23—to ask you at the holiday party how many kids you have. The institution, and nothing else, allows you to laugh in her face, in a goodnatured way, without repercussions. But it is a hollow community, a loose collection of our shared definitions, hopes, fears that we can project onto others’ relationships. Marriage is the signifier that we treat like a sign.

And so I project, but I don’t proselytize. Last night I took my friend out for dinner for her impending 30th birthday. We couldn’t make plans for her actual birthday, on Valentine’s Day, because she will be in London, where her boyfriend is trying to make her move for an arbitrary career change, and then Paris, where he will likely formally propose, an act that everyone acknowledges will hasten said moving plans. I ask her if she wants to get married, if she’s ready.

“The only issue I have is the drinking,” she says. It’s come up before: he doesn’t know when to quit. He gets too drunk on weeknights. He’s too easily influenced by his friends. He promises to be more responsible but never is. Run-of-the-mill behavior set to expire by 30, is what I always say (with some flourishes from my own booze-soaked personal history). It’s OK if he only wants to grow up for your sake, I try to reassure her. It doesn’t matter how we grow up as long as we eventually do.

“But he’s an angry drunk,” she says over her sangria, with the bluntness that children of divorced parents often have that makes me feel ashamed of my naivete. “If he was a nice drunk, do you think we’d still be having this conversation?”

I don’t know why it shocks me, but it does. I want to tell her to run (or more accurately, stay), to cut him loose, to get over the idea of marriage when neither of them ever wanted kids anyway. But I don’t. It occurs to me that the only thing I might have real opinions on is other people’s lives, but no one needs an evangelist for their own happiness. I take a swig of sangria and force myself to say, “Nothing will be better than Paris on Valentine’s Day.”