A single woman despairs that she will ever find herself a husband and 'saviour'. It's high time she addresses her lack of self-worth, says Mariella Frostrup
The dilemma I'm 28. I'm a nice person. All I have ever dreamed of is being married. I know I would make the perfect wife. I'm not jealous, I'm not a pushover, yet I would devote myself to making sure my husband is happy. Deep down, I want to feel needed. I want to be the person who fusses over my husband's dinner, who keeps a perfect running household and still manages to look elegant and beautiful at dinnertime. I want to be taken care of, to be looked after, but more importantly to feel safe. All my friends are getting married, some of them to guys who are really, really below their league, and yet I cannot find anyone who wants to marry me. I'm constantly searching for that one person who will be my saviour. My greatest fear is that I will end up alone.I can see myself at 40, still single and living in a little flat that I bought at 28, which seemed super independent and grown-up but at 40 seems like the biggest humiliation.
Mariella replies I'm intrigued by what makes you feel worthless. For many young women the dream of independence and a home of their own is a tantalising goal while a lifetime devoted solely to catering for another person's needs would be hard to countenance. Yet here you are celebrating and anticipating a supporting role that we all thought had died with the sexual revolution. It's certainly proof that there is no one route to personal happiness.
Yet I can't help but question how realistic your vision of wedded bliss is. A saviour? Isn't that a rather heavy load to lay on any person's shoulders? And what exactly would he be saving you from, aside from your own company? I could take the easy route here and embark on a feminist polemic about the millions of women still trying to escape the lifestyle you are so eager to embrace. But there's little sport in playing to the crowd so predictably.
It may surprise regular readers but I'm not going to argue that personal dignity and a sense of purpose are solely available via financial independence and the workplace. There are many people leading lives of value and contentment who don't calculate their worth by their progress up the career ladder. Until recently it wasn't a choice but an expectation that women were created to keep the home fires alight, and just because it's out of fashion doesn't mean it's not for you.
The more brutal it gets in the working world, the more appealing the prospect of having someone at home creating a sanctuary becomes. Increasingly couples, particularly with children, are making that tough choice, with one or other partner electing to embrace domestic duties while the other brings home the cash. It may halve your income, but in the happiest of cases I suspect it can also seriously enhance your quality of life. A typical example occurred publicly only recently when the much-loved Radio 4 news-presenter Alice Arnold elected to give up her career to facilitate the escalation in her girlfriend Clare Balding's career. Had Alice not been in a lesbian relationship I'm sure there would have been a deluge of outraged feminist rhetoric about her choice to support her partner.
As a child of the 70s it's a choice that I'm programmed to disparage until I look around at the declining standards of family life. When the going gets tough the prospect of delegating half your responsibilities to a willing volunteer, either to play a supporting role or take over the breadwinning, certainly holds allure. So you may not be as out of sync with the times as you first appear.
That said there are seriously troubling assumptions in your letter. No one can "make you feel safe" and indeed one of the most vulnerable positions you can assume is delegating responsibility for your existence to another. You need to create value in your own life and you may find it's this absence of self-worth that's having an impact on your dating appeal. Whether or not you intend to give up work eventually, you really need to start getting a little bit more joy out of life in the meantime. Sitting around waiting for Lancelot to ride out of the mist is wholly unrealistic. Furthermore, the romantic hero of your fantasies is likely to be a flesh and blood mortal of the sort your girlfriends are lowering themselves to consort with.
Engage with your present life, celebrate your good fortune in having your own home in these unstable times, and stop judging your girlfriends' romantic choices and being so prescriptive about your own. That way your ambitions can be detached from your fantasies and stand a better chance of coming to fruition.
And one final word of warning: British men are given a hard time for their unreconstructed tendencies, but in truth there are very few of them today who confuse servant with wife. To seduce this future husband you may need to come up with some more original dreams to take to the dinner table.
If you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk. To have your say on this week's column, go to guardian.co.uk/dearmariella. Follow Mariella on Twitter @mariellaf1