A young, unmarried female reader named Priti was down in the dumps. She had planned to move to the UK and marry a British guy, but had been put off by a factoid she had read. "The average British man has slept with 2.8 million people," she said. "I read it in the newspapers."
I told her that this couldn't be right. Clearly, the fact that Madonna was now living in the UK had raised the averages. Besides, how could people find the time?
"The press is wildly exaggerating the facts," I commented. "I'm sure the average British guy has not slept with more than 2.7 million women, max."
I asked readers to do some research. A male reader quickly found the original study, issued by a pharmaceutical group last month in London. "It includes partners of partners of partners," he said.
"It doesn't mean each guy has actually slept with 2.8 million individuals, just that he could technically have acquired germs from that number of people."
He was trying to help, but just made it sound worse. "Each British guy has 2.8 million germs?" Priti asked. "Ewww. Where do they keep them?"
She added that Americans were not much better, since they had trivialized marriage. As proof, she showed me a recent cutting about a US man who interrupted his own wedding vows to update his Facebook page.
With the bride on his left and the minister in front of him, Dana Hanna of Maryland whipped out a mobile phone and started typing: "Standing at the altar with Tracy Page."
A video clip of him doing this got hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube. He was thrilled with the response, which consisted largely of comments ranging from "What an idiot" to "What an idiot".
Sitting in a coffee shop, I told Priti to stay in Asia, where society still takes marriages seriously. Unluckily, my speech was interrupted by an email popping up on my laptop screen.
A reader chose that moment to send me a story about an Indian court which had granted a divorce to a woman who claimed that he treated her cruelly by refusing to let her watch Hindi soap operas on TV. The judge, horrified, dissolved the marriage on the spot.
This left Priti with two choices: move to Sri Lanka, where 98.5 percent of people stay married; or to the Philippines, where no one at all gets divorced - it's illegal to do so. Women who want to give themselves more time to sort out the issues should avoid Bangladesh, where most brides are teenagers, and move to Canada, where the average age of first marriage is 33. (I blame this on the thick clothing they have to wear.)
Meanwhile, passing a screen showing TV news on the way home, I noted that Tiger Woods' list of transgressions is becoming ever longer. No doubt it will eventually reach 2.8 million. Time for him to move to the UK, perhaps?
But before the evening ended, I got a shocking bulletin from a reader. "Whatever happens, tell Priti to avoid South Korea. Laws protecting women from lying, predatory men have just been rescinded." More details on that one tomorrow.
The writer is a columnist and journalist.
