Earlier this year, the woman in my life and I decided to postpone our wedding. My partner - whom I will call Barry to confuse you into thinking we are a gay couple and thereby protect her anonymity - and I decided it wasn't worth it. As Barry and I are the sort of Guardian-reading types who not only grow their own alfalfa from politically correct Cuban seeds but weave the results into bicycles that we ride to work and then eat for lunch, we never really wanted to get married. (How do we get home from work you ask? Why, we grow alfalfa at the office too!) We preferred instead to knit each other eco-friendly shirts from each other's hair of an evening.

For 20 years we have lived together happily in sin. As Joni Mitchell put it in words that make right-thinking alfalfa weavers the world over cry into their hemp singlets: "We don't need no piece of paper from the City Hall, keeping us tied and true." Nor, being atheists, do Barry and I take marriage to be a sacrament, while we obviously totally respect those who do.

What, then, made us contemplate solemnising our commitment to each other at a pounds 100 bumper fun day out with the nice lady registrar from Islington council? It was the thought that if I was run over on my alfalfa bike by a bus, my laughable pension would not find its way into Barry's bank account. It was also because custody of our baby daughter, whose anonymity I will protect by calling her Arthur, would not fall to me in the event of Barry's death, but quite possibly to Barry's mother, whom I will be calling Peter. Frankly, I don't want Peter to raise Arthur, not least because Peter has consistently frowned on Barry's alfalfa-based lifestyle, damn him! Let's call the nice lady registrar Reg, incidentally.

But there was a problem. Lots of other people insisted on horning in on our bumper fun day. Our distant relatives Hengist and Horsa, not to mention Uncle Siegfried, Cousin Tristan and Auntie Brunnhilde (real names withheld) wanted to come, too. "You've got to make it into a big day where you declare your love publicly," said one of my male friends, whom we will call Isolde. But as Barry and I declare our love incessantly in private, and our intimates surely know of our feelings, that reason hardly seemed compelling. We started to get cold feet. And then we found out that if I signed a nomination form and sent it to my pension department, my laughable pension would go to Barry in the event of my demise. We discovered, too, that if we changed our wills, our daughter Arthur could be raised legally by me and not Barry's mum if Barry died. So Barry called Reg and told him the wedding was off. "Happens all the time, Barry," said Reg.

How does all this bear on the Law Commission's proposals to give cohabiting couples the same rights as married ones? According to Tory women's spokesman Eleanor Laing, people like me and Barry are likely to make a mockery of marriage if the proposals become law. "Of course people who cohabit for a significant length of time have some rights over mutually acquired assets, but there ought to remain a distinction between cohabitation and marriage," she says. One of those "mutually acquired assets", Eleanor, is Peter, our daughter, thanks very much. In any case, had these proposals loomed before we contacted Reg, we wouldn't have bothered with our nixed nuptials at the town hall.

But is marriage such a tender flower that people like me and Barry risk crushing it under our bike wheels (before, of course, sensibly recycling it on our compost heap)? The extension of legal rights to Barry and me is inevitable, given that they have already been granted by means of civil partnerships to the likes of my gay friends, whom I will call Susan and Jeremy. And why shouldn't we have them? After all, just because we don't want to be married doesn't imply that we are a couple of flakes who can't commit. We are Barry and Stuart, a couple who love each other so much that we wear each other's hair to prove it.

Project Stuart, which you may recall was established as a makeover project to rival Project Gordon, the scheme aimed at making the chancellor cuddlesomely electable, is back. This week, my makeover specialists decided that I should copy John Prescott and get rid of things that taint my otherwise unimpeachable proletarian credentials. The deputy prime minister has dispensed with Dorneywood; I've put my inflatable travel croquet set on eBay. No great loss: it always took a lot of puff to blow up the mallet and the balls raced over the lawn in windy conditions.

What's more, I've subscribed to Tesco's GI Diets, and they've just sent me an email headlined: "Tone up - Lose the beer gut! Start today!" In the spirit of cooperation that must exist between Project Stuart and Project Prescott, my minders are going to get the deputy prime minister signed up, too. The idea is that Prezza will not not just be a deputy prime minister without portfolio but also without the unslightly belt overhang. With luck and hard work, John, our guts will soon be history and we'll both be the best that we can be!

Finally I'd like to apologise to Jordan for writing that she leads a worthless life. I made a tangential swipe at her in an article about British values. Several correspondents have pointed out that she is raising a disabled child. But that's not the reason I want to say sorry. It's not because of the difficulties she may be facing as a mother, but because it's shameful for me to condemn a whole life without knowing it. I can't help but think of how, on Celebrity Big Brother two years ago, Johnny Rotten derided Jordan for her celebrity. Fair enough, except for the fact that he incessantly referred to her as "it", which undermined any sense his critique of her celebrity might have had. My blanket dismissal of her "worthless" life was similarly hopeless. I don't want to be one of those toxic columnists who get paid for being baselessly nasty. Nor do I want to be like Sharon Osbourne, who said foul things about Rebecca Loos, or the Boston man who wrote abusively to me saying that judging from my picture byline, a rabbit had crawled up my bum. So shame on me. On the plus side, though, the rabbit is thriving.

· This week Stuart watched The March of the Penguins and Grizzly Man, and preferred the latter's bleak existential vision to the former's twee one. Stuart saw Tate Modern's rehang, loved the Munoz and the Rothko rooms, and the Beuys installation but quickly got tired and irritable as he always does when he goes there, so had a lie down outside