Every girl should be married

Couples have had a tough time of it these past six years. Ever since Helen Fielding coined the phrase "smug marrieds", getting hitched has been wildly unfashionable. Married couples were not only considered boring and suburban, they were smug and arrogant too. Singletons ruled, chicklit was it and Sex and the City was a national obsession.

Beautiful, intelligent and fun women I knew became self-obsessed, convinced that because Bridget Jones was enthralling and funny, their own love lives must be too. If you were married, you had to keep quiet while your still-single best friends bored you with every nuance of their disastrous dalliances. I know because I was there. Having been with the same man since I was 21 (I'm now 29), I lived through the whole singleton craze as an unpaid therapist to my cavorting gal pals.

Not any more. Couples are back in vogue, literally. February's American Vogue was billed as "The Couples Issue - 100 Love Stories", with soft focus pictures of Brad and Jennifer, J-Lo and Ben Affleck, Bowie and Iman. A few years ago, such romantic slush would have caused mini-Bridgets the world over to choke on their Marlboro Lights.

Even today's twentysomethings are in on the trend. The 20-year-old Russian model and new face of Calvin Klein, Natalia Vodianova, married an English aristocrat last year and has a one-year-old son, while Reese Witherspoon was married with a baby by the time she was 24. Posh and Becks have made marriage a lifestyle aspiration, and the single life just doesn't look such fun any more. Kate Moss, who made being single look cool, has settled down and the only role models singletons have now are Geri Halliwell and Jordan (enough said).

The literary world has also caught on to our growing revolt against the endless whinging of single girls. British Vogue gaily announced in this month's issue that "chick-lit is out and marital lit is the newest publishing phenomenon". Hopefully we'll see the end of stories about sappy, dysfunctional thirtysomethings crying into their Chardonnay.

The big read this summer is Sex and the Married Girl. Written by former Cosmopolitan editor Mandi Norwood, it's the modern follow-up to Cosmo founder Helen Gurley Brown's famous 1960s handbook, Sex and the Single Girl. And yes, it's all about being young, happily married and still getting it on. Hurrah! To top it all off, the final series of Sex and the City will end with all four of our bachelorette heroines getting hitched.

We're bored with cynicism and broken relationships. We want to prove that good, old-fashioned fairy-tale romance does exist. Us marrieds can breathe a sigh of relief, I can wear my silver band without shame, admit to my friends that I'm happy and that being married is great. Single girls, you've had your say and for far too long. It's time for couples to take centre stage again.