“Come to California,” I said.

“I will if you marry me,” Ira replied.

This was two days before I was leaving for Los Angeles for work, and a week after same-sex marriage had been legalized there, making it reciprocally legal in New York State, where we live.

“No,” I told him bluntly. “Not now.”

He didn’t take offense. “Whatever,” he said.

There are plenty of reasons not to tie the knot. Like many men, I had always been in fierce and firm command of them all. First off, as someone who had been a defensive single most of my adult life, I still believe that solitude makes you a deeper person, not a lesser one. So I felt kind of guilty for being in a couple.

Then there’s the fact that marriage often lasts about as long as a Botox injection. And what is marriage anyway but (if I may be so pretentious) a hetero-normative institution that clumsily mixes property and the State with the divine and ethereal ideals of love?