had just returned from the hair salon, my hair blown out and newly streaked with blonde, to find the bridal suite of our Washington DC hotel empty. It was littered with gift baskets and half-empty beer cans, crunched in the center, wadded-up napkins smeared with pizza sauce. The night before, I'd fallen asleep on the couch, one leg dangling off the side, having tiptoed in from the downstairs bar at 2am and accidentally woken up Tara on the night before her wedding by closing the Roman shades, which lowered with a rusty screech. As far as I could tell, those creaky curtains were the one flaw in her sprawling, luxury penthouse -- aside from the fact that, on the night of the wedding, I was no longer allowed to stay there.

Anyway, I rolled the blinds back up -- screech, screech -- and noticed fully, for the first time, what a stirring view the window afforded. It looked out upon the Union Station train depot -- a grandiose structure that makes traveling by train seem far more romantic, and chic, than the good people of Amtrak have actually made it. The street was clustered with those ornate white buildings that made me feel as though I were living in Rome, as though everyone outside spoke another language. But if I strained to the right, I could see the Capitol. It was, by all means, quite the spot to enjoy the weekend of our nation's Independence.

Nursing a bit of a hangover from all the fun I'd had at the rehearsal dinner, I laid down on the couch -- leg still dangling, foot jittering back and forth now, an irritating habit of mine -- and picked up the book I had stuffed in my tote bag: "I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage." I had been reading the book for work, had simply grabbed it from my bedside table, but now reading it at a wedding (as the only single female around aside from, say, the flowergirls) felt like a kind of punk sneer, a posture I had no intention of suggesting. Why hadn't I just grabbed the Michael Chabon novel?

Housekeeping knocked and entered. I stood up awkwardly, pretending to be busy with the napkins on the table. I don't know about you, but I can't laze around reading cultural histories while someone makes my bed, not without feeling overwhelmed by a need to help, a regret that I could not miss this awkward class collision, and a guilt for all of it. Should I leave? Should I offer her something? Should I speak? Fortunately, the housekeeper, a 30-something Latina with a charming head of bouncy black ringlets, spoke first.

"You getting married?" she asked me. She had an accent, so that it came out, "Joo getting married?"

"No. My college roommate, Tara. She's getting her hair done now. I'm not married."

"Ahhh," she said, as though this had just revealed to her some great truth about my character (and, in a way, I suppose it had). "You don't believe in marriage," she said with a wink.

"No, no, I do!" (The book! Hide the book!) "That's not it." I love marriage! I believe in marriage! I am one of the rare breed of American children whose parents are still married -- to each other -- which makes me something like a unicorn. In college, some of my girlfriends shunned marriage -- often musing out loud about their desire to be married to a life of adventure and discovery and the pursuit of erotic experience instead of a drab man who wanted you to cook him salmon steaks after work. But I never doubted that I wanted marriage, not for a minute. I want to cook a drab man salmon steaks! (Actually, I can't cook. I have never doubted the institution of marriage, but many of its cliches, like the idea that a woman must know her way around a kitchen, I did not buy.) As oversold as it is, as quaint as it may sound, the idea of finding a man to share my life has never struck me as anything less than dazzling. Maybe I'm naïve. I actually kind of envy the cynics and the professionally cranky who have been disillusioned about marriage; they seem to cry in public places far less frequently than me.

"So why aren't you married?" she asked.

Single folk despise this question, rightfully so, because it has no proper answer. Or rather, its answer is so complicated and private, with so many jagged edges, that to put your hand around it -- to touch it even -- is to bleed. We end up saying things we don't mean, incomplete and imprecise cliches. On this occasion, what I said was this: "I guess I'm waiting to meet the right guy."

"Yes!" she said, very excited, as though I had really cracked open the case. "That is a great idea. The right man is important "

Her enthusiasm made me feel special and clever, two of my favorite qualities in myself. It shortcircuited the self-pitying impulse that sometimes creeps up on me during these conversations, a mixture of annoyance and defensiveness and grief -- not grief that I'm not yet married, since I find no shame in singlehood, but grief that not so long ago I believed I had found the right man, and I was wrong. It had been four months. Shit still stung.

"I met the right man," she went on, now pulling plush white towels out of her green cart. "He helps with everything. He helps with cooking, with cleaning, he helps with the children. He helps with all of it." I felt genuinely happy for my new friend, and then it occurred to me that some woman goes home from her job cleaning up beer cans and wadded-up napkins from strangers' hotels, and her husband does not help with the cleaning or the children, and that person -- for sure -- did not find the right guy.

"It was our anniversary yesterday," she told me. I was beginnning to believe this woman was putting me on somehow; I could not have scripted her myself. "I was so tired I forgot!" She giggled. How do you forget your anniversary when it's on the Fourth of July? "We were lying in bed last night, and he said, it's 13 years today and I said, oh I can't believe this! I can't believe I forgot! Now I'm telling you --" and here, her fingers touched her chest -- "he is the right man."

I felt a little blue when she left and the door closed behind her. Everything was so silent.

I wondered if I would feel more blue at this wedding -- wondered if my mind would maroon itself in selfish sadness, as I have found myself doing at other festive moments. (How unfortunate that other people's happiness can be the cause of such private anguish.) But the weekend had, instead, been raucous fun. I did not swallow back tears when speech givers ruminated about love and commitment and the beautiful, hilarious, unlikely stories that occur when two people are finding each other. I did not feel a twinge of envy that my dear friend Tara had found someone who looked upon her so adoringly, whose love was so palpable -- I only felt gratitude that she had.

I felt lucky all weekend, in fact, a nice change from the whingeing I had been indulging lately. Lucky to be watching fireworks in the capital, lucky to be sleeping in the hotel's fanciest room, lucky that I fit into my bridesmaid's dress despite what felt like a two-month binge of burgers and beer, lucky to still be so close with someone I met at the age of 18 that she would ask me to stand beside her on her wedding day, even if that did require wearing burnt orange. And considering that it did, I felt lucky that the dress actually looked a bit foxy on me, and I did not feel the desire to rip it off the moment I unlatched my arm from my groomsmen's escort at the end of the aisle. No, I wore it through the reception (lucky to be at the National Press Club! Presidents dined here!), where a live band played country music (I was lucky if I knew every 10th song, but I was lucky that you could dance to the unfamiliar ones anyway) and lucky that I never once fell on the dance floor despite the fact that 1.) I was barefoot, thus making my dress drag on the floor and 2.) I was twirling madly, like an 8 year old on a tire swing making herself sick, and 2.5 ) at one point when we were dancing together Tara actually spun me around 20 times (I counted) in a row and 3.) there was an open bar. I was lucky that the other bridesmaids were warm, capable women, attentive to such details as the status of Tara's veil and lipstick and champagne glass, thus enabling me to twirl madly on a dancefloor and read away an afternoon in her bridal suite. (Oh, and lucky that they had such hidden talents as a precision with contour eyeshadow, a craftiness with cleavage issues, and an understanding of the necessity for wine and brie.)

You hear nightmare stories about the backstage dramas that eclipse at weddings. Mothers storming out in protest, brides crumpled in tears because the linens arrived in the wrong shades of lilac. I've never seen the show "Bridezilla," but I imagine it would just make me weary and sad and even more distrustful of the wedding-industrial complex than I already am. But what strikes me about this particular wedding is how easygoing and unruffled Tara was. This has been true of all my friends whose marriages I have been a part of, in fact. Their calmness amazes me, as someone who has been known to unravel because there is a typo in her story. Maybe it shouldn't amaze me. I seem to surround myself with people who are calming, which is a a good thing, since I seem to so often crave calming down.

I spent most of the reception, and the three hours afterward, with a couple I also met in college -- I knew them separately for years and watched as they, improbably and passionately, fell in love -- and whose wedding I was lucky enough to attend more than 10 years ago. They have twins now, and despite our promises to visit each other more often, to take advantage of the 4-hour train ride that separates our homes, a combination of hectic schedules and inertia has prevented that. In the nearly three years that I have lived in New York, I have visited them at their lovely, leafy home in Alexandria, Virginia a total of exactly zero times, and so it was lucky that we had such a delightful excuse to reunite.

Whenever I see this couple, which is far too infrequently, I am reminded of how hilarious and smart they are -- and they make me feel hilarious and smart, too, so that by the end of our time together I seem to have misplaced that dull heartache, that little stab of loneliness I'd been lugging around with me.

Near the end of the evening, during one of the slow songs, the three of us danced together -- a peculiar, lopsided little trio, arms wrapped around each other and swaying to the unfamiliar country twang-- and it occurred to me that while I have not yet met the right guy, whatever the hell that means, I have had incredible luck in finding the right people to share my life.