Does "I love you" have an expiration date?

Another Sex in the City inspired post....

In one episode, Carrie tells Big that she loves him. He responds with some comment totally off subject, and she gets annoyed. She concludes that an unreturned "I love you" has about the same shelf life as a dairy product...about a week.

In another episode (or maybe the same one? ) Samantha sums up the problem men and women have with those three little words...

You can tell a man you hate him and have the best sex of your life. But tell him "I love you" and you'll probably never see him again.

Is that really true? Has love become so scarce that people have to ration it out, choosing to walk away instead of loving in return? What are we so scared of?

And what about the love between two people when a relationship ends? Does it stay out there in the universe, somewhere in the background like an inconspicuous piece in a big collage? Just an eye or a hand or a bit of color within the big picure?

Or does that expire too...souring and congealing -- needing to be put out with the week's peelings and egg shells like that carton of milk from the back of the fridge that no one wants to open?

Oh heck, I really am like Carrie!

For a long time...even before I ever saw the HBO series Sex in the City, my friends told me I was just like Carrie. I didn't have HBO, so I didn't know who Carrie was except that she was on a series that I assumed featured a lot of sex. I didn't get the connection at all.

Then Sex in the City came to network TV. And I got hooked! They were right...

Of course, there is the obvious...Carrie is a writer, I am a writer. But I quickly saw there was more...

Like Carrie, I really and truly believe in the possibility of love happy ever after...in one episode she said:

I'm looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love.

Yup, that's me. Not the cynical, cold and fearful Miranda, the rules obsessed Charlotte or the "just the sex please" Samantha. Nope. I am the Carrie-esque believer in true love. The hopeless romantic to the core.

And like Carrie, I've had a lot of near misses. But I still believe. Maybe it goes with being a writer. Maybe it's harder to be a lawyer or a public relations specialist or work in an art gallery and maintain that belief in the white knight. As a writer, we are aware of the meaning that a single word can hold -- and of the incredible value that three words (or the absence of those three words) can contain.

And we won't even go into the shoes! I had a dozen pairs of $200+ shoes before I hit age 21! The semi-annual Nordstrom shoe sale is still something I have to avoid if I want to pay my bills. And the fact that I'm working on a high end shoe catalog right now...well, let's just say, I left my credit cards locked away!

And now, even the settings from Sex in the City are showing up! Friday night, I went out for dinner and dancing. And as I walked into the restaurant with friends and my boyfriend, I stopped cold...there in front of me, right out of Sex in the City, were the beds. The beds you were supposed to eat on! They were real! It was all I could do not to laugh out loud!

Unfortunately, no one in my group was willing to sit on the beds for our dinner so we dined at a regular table. Next to a bed. While I wondered what it would be like to sit there on the red velvet, relaxing against the pillows and eating a meal right out of a television show.

My friends have wondered why I didn't blog about Sex in the City before...and I kept meaning to. I guess it took some red velvet canopy beds to push me over the edge.