Holding up a noose

Conversation at the annual family gathering has turned around to the subject of marriage again. Dodging bullets is the only term I can think of that covers what goes on here. Me and my cousins had a well - synchronized team which used to provide cover fire while those in extreme danger threw down their arms and made a run for safety - quite literally, in fact. Belive me, in familial surroundings, there is nothing quite as discomfiting as two members of the elder generation catch you in a pincer movement while you frantically look around for somebody to bail you out, so you can excuse yourself under the pretext of going to the loo while someone else draws the oppositions fire ( and ire, in most cases.)
Unfortunately our team doesn't work as well anymore, due to a lot of factors. The first, and possibly the most important, is that age has caught up with us. We are old (or at least on the marriageable-age scale, certain members of the team are), and the enemy senses this - actually, rather *knows* this and fights battles with ever increasing vigour. The fact that one of the members of our team is missing doesnt help, even though he is one of the older ones - at least he would be able to draw half the abuse away, and quite frankly he's pretty capable at handling himself.
Our team also doesn't have the same trust in each other anymore, due to a few political fallouts. Although I want to be a perfect professional while playing the Game, sometimes personal opinions tend to spill over which leads to you sometimes having sympathies with the other side. There also isnt much of a payoff for the younger ones on the team, such as me, for by the time we have to fight our own wars the older ones will already be married and we wont be able to get too much support from them, which particularly gets to me because I will need all the help I can get when I marry my girlfriend - the Family is very orthodox, and does not accept people not chosen by them. In fact, any of our girlfriends/boyfriends would be treated as though they had evolved from the apes barely a generation ago.
Still, we live to tell the tale another day, though each battle becomes harder- we have to resort to increasingly guerilla militant tactics. Well, whatever works - as the saying goes, when we fight and run away, we live to fight another day.