True Life Toronto Adventures:

I am having lunch with a therapist/marriage counsellor -- I am not in therapy or married -- and we are talking about this and that, and I mention that I have seen a lot of movies recently in which the big moment is when one person says "I love you" to another -- this seems to be the threshhold after which everything else is a minor detail (comparatively). Is this true in the young people she sees. She says that this is the big deal: sleeping together, hanging out together, whatever, are nothing. Once you say "I love you" you are just about to start living together. It comes very late. People were always throwing around the "L" word in her day (i.e. my day), but this seems to be the hard line to cross now. I ask her if she can tell when two slightly older people are really serious about getting married. In this culture, it obviously cannot mean when they start sleeping together. She says that in people from about 25 - 50 it is when they reveal their incomes to each other, not their genitals. Money is the big secret. I ask her about any other shifts she has noticed in her years of practice, and she says that the interesting thing is how nothing much really changes -- people still aren't talking to each other, and coming into her office and in the presence of the other person saying things that neither of them can believe the other has always thought. She shrugs her shoulders, and we go on to talk about other things, including her own recent messy divorce. As we are leaving, she turns to me and says: "Oh, yes, one other thing has changed. A lot more women are trying out being lesbian." Oh yes, I say, and do you think it is because they are inherently lesbian, or it is just an interesting option now more obviously available? "Don't know," she says, "I will have to ask my new girlfriend."