Yes, I'm a one-woman freak show!

Some days I love singledom so damn much I positively gloat about all the freedoms and fun it offers me – full-time TV remote access, sleep-ins, five hour drunken lunches with gal pals and of course, dating inappropriate men I definitely can't take home to mama.
Then I have days when I feel like a total freak show - take this morning, for instance. Look, I’m used to family members banging on about missing boats and being left on shelves and why oh why didn’t I just marry that cute boy I dated in my 20s when I had the chance, but I sure as heck wasn’t expecting a dressing-down from my Bangladeshi tiler.
I’d just made him a hot chocolate and he took the opportunity to take a break and engage me in small talk about husbands and kids and why I didn’t have either. My favourite topic. Not.
“You’re not married yet? You really should get married,” he said, frowning and slurping his hot chocolate.
“Why’s that Mohammad?” I asked idly, reaching for my third chocolate biscuit and wondering if he was going to offer to make me his second wife. It wouldn’t be the first time. Hey, I’ve been to Morocco.
“You work too much,” he lectured. “You work, work, work. I watch you. If you don’t marry, if you don’t have kids, what’s it all for? What’s life about? Just you and you alone? Working for nothing. That's no life. You may as well kill yourself now if you don’t find a husband, get married and have a couple of kids. You have nothing to live for otherwise. You may as well be dead.”
Hmmm, I thought I had every spinster cliche down pat but this was a definite first: being told I should consider topping myself because of my single state.
Somewhat floored, I muttered half-heartedly about how hard it was to meet people and Mohammad softened and agreed with me, but it wasn’t with any great fervor – after all, he’d had an arranged marriage back home in Bangladesh, the jammy sod.

*** On that note, how about you? Do you cop it from family members about being single? And more to the point, do you have any good comeback lines that might work on a cheeky Bangladeshi tiler?