At which point, readers may wonder whether the struggle is with something more fundamental – say, adulthood, of which the potential for lifelong commitment – something serious – something much like marriage – is generally considered a feature.

Silvia, we’re told, by Silvia, is “trying her hand in everything from film and video production to interior decoration.” As one might imagine, intersections abound, along with feats of the aesthetic:

Do note the eclecticism, the “air and movement.”

Update, via the comments:

Mr Muldoon notes Sylvia’s dissatisfaction with non-married coupling terms, and offers, among others, main squeeze, easy/steady rider, and paramour.

If something less colourful seems in order, might I suggest my Temporary, my Conditional. My For Now.

Oh, and sH2 adds,

Answers on a postcard, please.

And so, we have a grown man who dismisses marriage as beneath him, as something “for the conditioned masses,” while bemoaning the inadequacy of common terms for his preferred, supposedly more daring, alternative. As if the connotations of “girlfriend / boyfriend” – connotations of adolescence and immaturity – were somehow random or unjustly imposed.

Says Silvia,

It’s not made clear which aspects of marriage so offend our enormously radical interior decorator. But if it’s the lifelong monogamous commitment thing, with all of the advantages and obligations that typically go with it – the bourgeois grown-upness, as it were – then I can’t help wondering on what basis he would object to connotations of immaturity and unseriousness.