MY "forever single" friend shocked us all last summer by announcing that she was getting married.

She had been the last bastion of hope for me and while the world was pairing up and settling down, we would both sneer at the lot of them and then go out and behave badly.

It is a difficult thing to share a best friend, who has hitherto been a conviction singleton, with a new man in her life, and I didn't know what to feel about her bombshell announcement.

I was jealous - I had been the only true love in her life but here she was telling me how he rocked her world and made her belly-laugh. And I was worried - would she lose her ability to relate to me now that she was having regular love-ins with him? Six months after seeing her buffet around in a meringue and feeling like the only cat-owning-spinster left in Britain, I am now embracing my marital status, and my cat, after hearing about the rigours of married life.

I know it's never a bed of roses but is cohabitation and marriage always this bad? Where do I begin? He forgot to give her a present on her birthday. He bought her a Forever Friends card on Valentine's Day. She has been sleep deprived since their wedding night, not because he can't get enough but because he is tremendous with nasal action in the snoring department.

His idea of romance is taking her round to his mum's for home-made cake. Her bank balance is in the red because she has been spending so much on personal grooming and lacy lingerie. And what's it all for anyway? He is so shy she has not yet seen her husband naked, half a year on, and he has not peered beneath the sheets to view her fluffy bustier and thong combo.

Perhaps this marks me out as a single woman for life but I would much prefer to have both sides of the bed, a television remote in one hand, a custard doughnut in the other, and the refined company of a trusty feline who sleeps on the bottom left hand corner of the duvet. And doesn't snore.

LAST Friday, I felt an emptiness take grip around 10.05pm. I sat and stared at the television screen and as much as I willed it, there was only Friday night guff staring back at me, and not the four fashionable women I had grown to obsess over. For so long now, I have made Sex and the City a priority in my life, cancelling Friday night plans and making excuses to be back home by ten so I can tune into Carrie's ruminations on men, sex, life, love and everything.

Carrie and I had everything in common - we're both in our 30s, both journalists, both living in cities (the comparison ends there as I hate shoes and can't afford haute couture). But the biggest difference was that she lived the life and I watched it being lived. Now it is gone, maybe we can learn from it and live happier, freer, more daring lives as single women, with the fabulous legacy they have left behind.