“IT WILL be your turn soon!”

I’d only been with my boyfriend for a few months when I was his plus one at a wedding but it didn’t stop me from being on the receiving end of this phrase.

I mumbled, shuffled awkwardly, probably blushed and made noise which stood in for an answer.

Because the answer would have been “er, no!”.

I don’t mean this as any sort of slight on my boyfriend. But I really couldn’t hear wedding bells ringing in my ears after just a few months, or even now, after more than a year of living together and him having moved in.

I’m happy with how things are and really don’t feel the need to rush headlong into lifetime commitment.

But there’s always the danger that the wrong answer could result in upset and offence all round.

We’ve now been to four weddings together and at each one there’s been that awkward “It will be your wedding next” moment.

The worst of these, when I could feel my cheeks glowing scarlet, was when during his speech the groom suggested that soon we’d all be at my and my boyfriend’s wedding.

On this occasion I pretended to have gone spontaneously deaf and noticed something very interesting on the floor to avoid the 80 pairs or eyes that were looking at us.

I find these ‘you’re at a wedding, you have a boyfriend, therefore you must want to get married’ conversations very awkward, particularly if you’re having them with someone who’s recently got married, doubly so if it’s their wedding.

You can’t really say ‘the idea of wearing an expensive white dress and going to church doesn’t really appeal to me – particularly because I’m an atheist’ to someone wearing a wedding dress who has just uttered their vows.

At least I don’t feel any genuine pressure to marry, unlike one of my fellow guests at a recent wedding.

She’d been with her boyfriend for a decade and said she had to face a round of ‘shouldn’t you have got married by now’ comments at every wedding they attended. I got the impression that she was quite keen to wed so being asked this question regularly must have felt like having an old wound poked.

And of course, singletons don’t escape. Even if you’re happily single, attending the celebration of a couple’s love for one another and commitment while being surrounded by numerous other couples can make you feel that someone, anyone, would be better than being on your own.

Then there are the insensitive relatives who ask ‘why haven’t you got a boyfriend yet?’. Of course you think of all the witty ‘because I killed the last one’/‘because I’m becoming a nun’/‘because I like sleeping around’ responses after they’ve already walked away.

I don’t know what the answer is, other than to take a can of deodorant and some extra face powder to weddings to deal with all the blushing and sweating that weddings seem to bring on.