Happiness? Marital bliss? Bah, humbug!

Cynthia has married Abe. In the old days, I would have written an epithalamion, full of grace and conceit with a nasty hidden sting, but they met on the Internet and anyway nobody writes them any more, not epithalamions.

They met on the Internet. They really did. You hear of people meeting on the Internet but it doesn't usually work out.

I worked with a woman once who wanted to be enslaved. She met a man on the Internet who told her what to do, and they would have Internetty conversations about whether she was doing it. "Are you dressed as I commanded, slave?" he would write. "Yes, Master," she would write back; "i" - she wasn't allowed to capitalise it - "am clad in nothing but a latex bustier and 8in heels," which was nonsense because I could see her from where I sat. The correspondence became steamier, involving shackles, light engineering work and unnecessary language. Eventually he said he was coming to London and sent a photograph ahead of him. The man was a 4ft sphere, lightly matted with beard. Wouldn't do.

So when I heard that Cynthia and Abe had met on the Internet, I wrote it off. Her literary agent Felicity and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder. "We'll just have to tough it out for a month or two," she said, "and then Abe'll be toast. We've seen it before, after all."

Well; we had. Guys? Sure. We toughed it out for a month or two, and then the guys were toast and Cynthia went back to the dogs. She has lots of dogs, rescued dogs and bewildered dogs and mutts. Cynthia is a dog person. The guys' role is to make her realise it, then to go away, fade into the background, become history. Become toast.

Then, not so long ago, came the call. A message on my answering-machine. "Hi. It's Cynthia. I'm calling from New York. Abe just asked me to marry him. He said, and I quote, `Will. You. Marry. Me.' Words which I find... strangely compelling."

I didn't ring back. She tried to leave a number but couldn't; the hotel was so damn fashionable that nobody over the age of 18 could read the telephone number on the bedroom info-pack. Otherwise I would have rung back. "Don't!" I would have cried. "Don't! Don't!" You'd have done the same. It was all so sudden. They met on the Internet. You'd have said "Don't!" You'd have said "Feh!"

It wasn't just that. It was like... I don't know, the Second Coming, and finding old Jesus wandering around Stamford Hill, bristling with phylacteries and hunting for the Orthodox synagogue. Because Cynthia isn't just any old Cynthia, but Cynthia Heimel, author of Sex Tips for Girls, Playboy columnist, icon of American sisterhood, the world's only funny feminist, heroine and role-model to millions of young and not-so-young women who are bright and witty and self-determining and independent, and who do not - do not, dammit - buy into all this marriage schtick, this thinly- disguised phallocentric paternalist... marriage schtick.

And now Cynthia has married Abe. They seem well-matched, terribly happy, but of course it simply won't do. It's a question of principle, you see. A matter of consistency, duty, knowing what's what. We have our appointed roles in life and we shouldn't desert them. Now the world is falling apart. Merchant bankers are giving it all up and going off to the country to become dairymen. Weasely corporate accountants are out on the streets, starving. Nobody (apart from John Birt) believes management consultants any more. Even British Socialism has changed: integrity is no longer everything; table manners also count. And now Cynthia Heimel has married Abe. He calls her Bunny; she calls him Bear. I heard them doing it: "Bunny." "Bear."

So I suppose I must follow suit, but I can't work out what I need to do. I suppose the obvious thing to do would be to shut up, get a proper job and be happy. I could make an honest person out of the bad yellow- eyed woman, stop primping myself in front of the mirror, get some antibiotics for my pneumonia, earn some money, pay the gas bill, take out a mortgage, get an early night, put an end to all this showing off, eat sensibly, take my vitamins, face the music, look the world in the eye, give up smoking, don't start anything unless I intend to finish it, send out some Christmas cards, shape up, grow up, wise up and act my age.

Cynthia and Abe were in London last week, on their honeymoon, and I thought: if Cynthia can pull off an ethical U-turn like that, so can I. Friday night, I made all sorts of resolutions, mostly involving throwing away my wardrobe and adopting a Shaker-like policy of industrious modesty. I lay awake most of the night plotting these changes, but by Saturday evening I was holed up in a hotel room watching pay-per-view pornography, bubble-eyed on linctus and horrible Dutch weed, having spent a pleasant day in which I had been involved in a light but invigorating car crash before flying off to Ostend in a terrible state and a howling gale, and everything was going to pieces again.

I don't think I can do it. I think I have some terrible psychological disturbance. I yearn for stability, a quiet white room and the sheets of paper being steadily filled with a respectable, well-crafted body of work; but I end up prowling round to no avail, coughing like a bastard and worried sick that I might be missing something. It's a wasted life, really, but I can't think of anything else to do with it because just round the corner I know there's a double-jointed redhead, another lousy smoke-filled dive, another aeroplane, another nightclub, another wristwatch to yearn for, another immaculately-cut suit that will make me the man I always wanted to be.

Perhaps it's a religious quest; perhaps I'm a sort of martyr. It's a life, I suppose; but, on the other hand, Cynthia married Abe. I'm going to have to give it all some serious thought, when I get a moment. !