VIEWPOINTS

Ashleigh McIvor, Canada's Olympic ski queen, told a reporter last week that the ski cross techniques that won her a gold medal were learned by "chasing the boys down the hills" of her native Whistler and Cypress Mountains.

Last week, the Canadian boys were chasing her and other amazing female Canadians who competed in the 21st Olympic winter games. Canada fielded 43 women and 206 men this year. For the second winter Olympics in a row, the women out-medaled the men.

Canadians are crowing this week about their men’s gold-medal hockey victory over the Americans on Sunday. But for the preceding two weeks, their female athletes were the ones dominating the Canadian media.

(What does this have to do with intimacy? Plenty. Keep reading.)

I’d pay good money to see Delilah Rene, 50, and Hannah Seligson, 25, sit down over a bottle of Bordeaux and talk about love. Here’s why:

Delilah, whose nightly radio show by the same name is heard by 8 million listeners a week, calls herself the “Queen of Sappy Love Songs.” Her world, said Ellen McCarthy in last week’s Washington Post, is “a schmaltzy, airbrushed place where love is all that matters….”

A female reader named Marian emailed me recently to talk, in part, about close, non-romantic friendships with men.

“I know the men I have in my life, that I relate to with no sexual pretense, have played a huge part in how I see myself and the world at large,” she said. “They have helped me to put myself back out there after some really difficult times both with hooking up and just life in general.”

With Valentine’s Day less than a month away, it’s a good time to think about love. Not falling in love; that’s easy. Our body’s chemistry takes care of that.

No, it’s the what-comes-after-the-goopy-cards that I want to talk about: the loving. That’s what scares us. It consumes time, drains our emotions, and makes us vulnerable to hurt and loss. So why do we get sucked in, again and again? Because we are creatures who attach. Two recent TV documentaries expand on this.