I’d like to introduce you to four American women.

Anna and Patti are both in their sixties. They are tall, straight, slender women of Irish descent, with reddish-blonde hair and freckled, faintly golden skin. Bespectacled Dana and Vicky are younger, in their fourth and fifth decades respectively; one has Italian antecedents, and the other German ones. By birth all four are Yankees, though they’ve actually lived all over the place, from Oregon to New York. Like me, they enjoy chatting via keyboard, on internet forums.

I often find it hard to separate Anna and Patti in my mind. Not only do they look alike but they are both horse breeders, carriage drivers and handywomen in wood, leather and other materials. Vicky, too, has bred horses and is heavily involved with equestrian charities. Dana is the odd one out, because although I met her via a common interest in horses, she no longer owns a horse, nor does she ride or breed them.

Since meeting them, I’ve discovered that all four were, as my mother would have said, “inoculated with a gramophone needle in childhood.” I don’t know if this is an American characteristic, but certainly all the Americans I have met can talk. They talk, and talk, and talk. And then they talk some more. You can’t starve them or wear them down. The hungrier and tireder they are the more they babble. They only shut up when they are asleep, and even then they seem to have vivid dreams that they have to communicate as soon as they wake. I must be fond of them though – either that or I’m a masochist. I invite them to stay, and I accept their invitations to stay with them, though after 24 hours I find them terribly wearing. I wonder sometimes if they don’t actually know what silence is.

They have a common addiction to caffeine, from which they attempt to go cold turkey every now and again, by weaning themselves onto decaf for three weeks or so before going back to their drug. Maybe the emigrants from Britain and Europe were all inured to semi-starvation and that made them and their offspring over-sensitive to caffeine.

These women are helpful, yes, keen to educate, yes, friendly and knowledgeable, yes. But their political opinions are powerful, even dogmatic. For three of them, Bush is their prime target, the foolishness of the American voting public another, the war in Iraq a third, and a fourth is the worrying tendency of American Christian views to move toward fundamentalism. Dana until quite recently was a steadfast churchgoer, but she’s wavering a bit, since she prefers to commune with people whom she respects, and her church is not managing to gain her respect right now. She shares the others’ disdain for politicians, but she’s the one who asks questions, rather than making statements, and she likes to start discussions rather than obtain instant answers. And while the other three are articulate on paper, she is the one who gets paid for writing.

But Dana is also the odd one out because she’s married. Anna, Patti and Vicky are determinedly unmarried; although they’ve all been married one or more times they have opted for remaining divorced. They are immensely energetic, apparently well capable of managing their lives and raising and educating children as well as horses; but by their own accounts, the multiple husbands they chose were either control freaks or drunks. In all three cases, they gave their spouses ultimata: Reform or Get Out. And in all cases, these stern warnings strangely failed to produce any alteration in behaviour, so to the law courts they went, and divested themselves, serially, of their men. I sometimes wonder if the divorced husbands sighed with relief.

Of all the four, the one whose company is least wearing is Dana. We’ve shared some hysterical laughter at wacky activities like “photographing our Death scenarios” –  Dana with her head in a cannon’s mouth, me having mine pressed with an electric iron. But what I appreciate about her is not the wackiness, but the ability she has to worry her way into the heart of things. She’s done a lot of local journalism and can hit a deadline, in spite of which she is both a sensitive investigator and a truthful writer. Perhaps because she’s younger, in the years I’ve known her I’ve seen her alter and grow up, from an airhead reformed potsmoker to a thinking woman; and although she is as big a perfectionist in her way as the others, she’s a good deal less dogmatic. Agonising over The Right Thing to Do with family decisions, she is the ultimate guilt-tripping Mother. She is the one who can most afford to have horses, but she has realised she doesn’t actually want to build the life of her family around them, or to develop the force of character to manage them. And she no longer bothers with internet forums, preferring to negotiate the time zones via Google Talk to speak directly to just a few friends.

I can’t say whether Anna, Patti and Vicky are happier than Dana. I divorced my husband, then remarried him, I still have a horse and I still write. I’m obviously sitting on whatever fence it is that divides their two positions. What I do know is that whenever I come across a husband and wife argument, it isn’t Anna’s or Patti’s or Vicky’s voice that I hear inside my head, insisting on what is Right; instead I hear Dana’s single quiet question: “Which do you want to be: Right, or Married?”