It was a staggering realization. You never really think about this kind of thing happening, and yet happen it does, silently. Marriage is like a cat: it sneaks up on you and your friends and, pow, that's it, middle age and kids. Ditto for divorce. I bumped into my first girlfriend, Cathi (who now fancies herself Catherine, apparently), online back in '96 or so; she had been married a few years and divorced already. It was funny -- I typed her name into a search engine recently and came up with this link, which shows you how little things change: she's got some random guy on her arm sporting a vaguely bemused look, as if he's thinking

Whatever. I'm just here to squire her around.

Mmm, ham and cheese wraps!

So back to the marriage-as-cat metaphor: we're all settled in now, all wedded and snug, having been pounced on and our unmarried selves' carcasses lovingly deposited in life's great living room. You think it won't happen to you or your friends, that you're too goofy. We have, as a group, little courage, and little understanding of our own worth. Learning self-promotion is as hard for us as a fish learning how to breathe. So when we were in our twenties, I think we all thought -- never spoke, one doesn't say these things -- it'll never happen, that we'd live our lives out in grumpy (or cheerful, depending on the basic mien) bachelorhood. But we were wrong. And that is a happy thing.