"Can you really see yourself being with one person for the rest of your life?"
This was the question posed to me by my girlfriend Lauren the other day, as she was contemplating whether or not to agree to commit to a man she'd recently started dating.
"Time is ticking on, so I'm not going to date guys forever," she continued. "But is this really going to be the one person I'm going to be with forever more?"
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She seemed confused. Sure, she'd done her fair share of dating. And yes, she was pretty certain that she was in love. But, still, that question niggled at the back of her mind. "Is it possible to think like that these days?" she asked me. "I mean, do you believe you could do that?"
I wanted to scream: "Yes! of course I do!" But realistically, I didn't have the answer. Nevertheless, her musings got me thinking: can modern-day singletons really see themselves settling down with just one person for the rest of their lives? Or has the transient dating scene made it impossible for any of us to contemplate such a thought?
"Absolutely not," said another girlfriend, Harriet, when I posed the same question to her over coffee a few days later. Hailing from a tiny town in northern New South Wales, Harriet reckons that if she had never moved to Sydney, she would have been married at 17 with two kids in tow by now.
"I would have never known anything different. So would I have been as happy? Probably yes."
But instead, she says that with the abundance of choice available to her and ripe for the picking (for the record she's in her late 20s with sparking sea-green eyes and a hot-to-trot body), it makes it all the more difficult for her to pick just one. I've seen the men flock around her, and I kind of know what she means.
"The problem is that there are too many ways out these days," she says. "And where I live now, there is always someone else around the corner. Or so it seems."
My friend Jake, who has a penchant for dating a number of women at once with the aim of "keeping his options open", concurs.
"I always have this mentality that the grass is greener. So nothing is concrete any more. You date, you live together, you might even get engaged. But then someone else comes along and you think, 'Am I making the right choice?' The answer is often sadly a 'no'."
When I asked my single thirtysomething mate Steve, he said that the fact there was so much choice made it all the more difficult to make a decision.
"That's why player-types will never become family men," he told me. "Too much choice makes it impossible for them to ever contemplate choosing just one."
"Are you a player?" I asked him.
"No. But that doesn't make the decision any easier for me either."
Author Barry Schwartz discusses this concept brilliantly in his book, The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less. He writes that, while the freedom of choice we have nowadays is critical to our well-being, freedom and autonomy, nonetheless "we don't seem to be benefiting from it psychologically". Instead, he says that more choice only leads to depression and feelings of loneliness.
True, in the midst of the current non-commital sexual zeitgeist, we now come face-to-face with the fact that fewer people are settling down, there are higher divorce rates and the median marriage age has been significantly delayed.
But where does it leave those who might want to settle down? Do we simply go into it with the expectation that things will come to an end once they've run their course? Is "happily ever after" now a thing of the past?
For Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, unfortunately, the answer seems to be yes. With their 25-year marriage suddenly kaput, it seems they really did go into it with the best intentions.
In fact, just a few years ago, Shriver told the media: "We are still engaged with each other, hot for each other, into each other. There hasn't been a moment when I have been bored. I have worked and worked on my marriage, and it has paid off."
But now? "Forever" is just no longer a certainty.
When I carried out an unofficial poll on the subject, the answers were split right down the middle. Fifty per cent said it was unrealistic to envision yourself with one person for the rest of your life and that it would never work; the other 50 per cent believed it could indeed happen.
Sir Paul McCartney has recently proposed for the third time – this time to millionairess Nancy Shevell - even though his previous wife took $50 million from him.
He says this time around it is indeed "real love", and that he won't be asking his new fiancee to sign a prenup. Third time lucky perhaps? Only time will tell …
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