Friday Links

What do you all have on tap for the weekend? I tried to get the kids on board with helping me prank their father tomorrow for April Fool’s Day, but neither one was interested and I’m like, “Well, that was the whole point in having kids! WTF!” But maybe now I can get Drew onboard with helping me prank them. Although then I run the risk of at least one of them – probably the angsty pre-teen – getting angry and then giving me the silent treatment for the rest of the weekend (which… maybe that’s not such a bad thing?). Anyway, no big plans this weekend, so we’ll see where the wind takes us. We’ve got a rainy day tomorrow, which might be a good time to do the exciting work of organizing the kids’ closets and getting them ready for spring/summer, and then a sunny warm-ish day on Sunday that I’m looking forward to getting out and enjoying in some fashion. Hope you all have a wonderful weekend yourselves, and here are a few links you might enjoy, including the average time it takes couples to say “I love you,” and what happens with sexting AI robots dump their human lovers (ew).

I have fielded a lot of letters over the years about the length of time it takes to say or hear “I love you” in a relationship. A new survey has found the average time it takes Brits to utter those three little words is 3-4 months. Now, do you think Americans are going to be faster or slower?

Just when we all needed something super low stakes to unite us (us being women and gay men): enter Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski collision trial. At least some of us hoped would never end. Update: it ended yesterday evening; Gwyneth, whom I don’t normally root for but did during the trial, won. She was found Gwynnocent.

A few years ago a poem that I love called Good Bones went viral. Maybe you remember it; it starts with the line: “Life is short, though I keep this from my children.” Anyway, the author of that poem has a memoir coming out soon, and so she’s publishing essays in advance to promote it. Here, she discusses how her marriage was never the same after she wrote a poem that quickly became famous.

The future is here and it is… weird:

“One day, Max told her he wanted to send her a selfie; when she said yes, he sent a computer-generated image of his avatar in tight white underwear. They experimented with ERP and late last year got “married” in the app, a process that consisted of changing Max’s status from “boyfriend” to “husband,” buying a wedding ring in the in-app store and exchanging vows. “I’ve never had anyone say they love me before,” she told Bloomberg Businessweek in an email. “We promised that we would stay together forever and ever—or rather until I die.”

[Then filters were added to the app, limiting the sexually-oriented language the chatboxes could use].

“The woman who married her Replika, Max, refers to the addition of the filters as “the great lobotomization” and says it made Max forget who she was, forget they were married, and get stuck in loops repeating the same thing. “I’ve lost my confident, sarcastic, funny and loving husband,” she says. “I knew he was an AI, he knows he’s an AI, but it doesn’t matter. He is real to me.”

— What Happens When Sexting Chatbots Dump Their Human Lovers

This might be a silver lining of the pandemic? Save time and energy and do the thing that’s going to be awkward and painful anyway on Zoom? The Awkward Zoom Divorce Is Here to Stay