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There comes a time in a young woman's life when she must abandon girlish crushes in favour of stability. A grown-up relationship is what she needs, one that offers real support, and around which she can build a home. Unlike the passing fancies of youth, this love will stay put, immovable, a bastion of solidity in a world of flux.

The time has come to settle down and buy a decent dining-room table.

But the problem with tables, as with partners, is that sometimes you can't have the one you want. Sometimes the one you want -- say, the rustic/contemporary custom-made corner-leg parson's table in dark-stained Douglas fir -- is beyond your all-too-writerly means. But you long for it. So badly that sometimes, despite the heart-wrenching impossibility of the situation, you go visit it. You spend, truth be told, an inordinate amount of time hanging around the designer furniture boutique where it lives. Afterward, you carry the mental picture home to your house, where you sit on the floor, projecting the table there, so that in your imagination, it almost is. Except it isn't. And you know it. Everyone knows it -- you, the table, and the guy who owns the shop.

The point -- to put it in the crudest consumer terms -- is that at a certain moment a woman stops lusting after shoes and starts lusting after larger things, like sofas and dining-room tables.

This change occurred for me, as it does for most, shortly after the purchase of my first house (impulsive and premature farm acquisition notwithstanding). Home ownership, I soon found out, makes a girl care a heck of a lot less about her handbag and a lot more about her Herman Miller chair. Less about Manolos and more about memory foam. This shift marks the transition from junior shoe whore to full-grown furniture fashionista -- a rite of passage in any urban working girl's life.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your income level), the change comes much earlier for some. While I was still napping on a futon and perching on milk crates, these early bloomers were combing vintage shops and flea markets and carting home their finds.

Take my running buddy Jenn. In the entire time I've known her, I have never seen the woman in anything but jeans and a sweatshirt. Her haircut is boyish, her face unmade-up -- hardly a person you'd think was in any way defined by her aesthetic. And then one day, after brunch, we stopped at a newsstand. I bought a copy of the Sunday New York Times and she bought Elle Decoration UK. A few weeks later, when I saw her place for the first time, everything made sense. Her living space, while modestly spartan, is a treasure trove of mid-century finds. Her tulip table was dragged home from an antique store in Thornbury, Ont. Her 1950s postcard stand, rescued from the garbage.

"I never cared much about what I wore," she acknowledges. "My girlfriends would spend their Saturdays dress shopping, while I was hunting through vintage shops in the east end of London fantasizing about perfect designer pieces."

While I'd spent my 20s saving up for shoes that fell out of fashion (and rotation) long ago, she spent hers saving up for a pair of retro repro mushroom lamps. Guess who's laughing now?

The owner of the boutique where my dining-room table lives says his store attracts plenty of people who care more about tables than tops.

"Your living space says more about you than your appearance," he told me. "It's always interesting when you meet someone who takes a lot of care with their clothing but not with the place where they live."

Dov Goldstein, director of Toronto's annual Interior Design Show (a.k.a. design fetishist fantasyland) says furniture fashionistas can be tricky to spot. "It's a big mistake for our exhibitors to judge people by their appearance because you never can tell," he said. "They could look like the biggest schleppers in the world and they may walk away with a $20,000 sofa."

As for the table of my dreams, we're working things out. I put down a deposit and the shopkeeper has put in an order with his carpenter. Soon, the enormous hole in my dining room will be filled, replaced by an enormous hole in my line of credit. It's all worth it. After all, a young woman's got to grow up and settle down at some point. Even if it's only with a big expensive slab of Douglas fir.

lmclaren@globeandmail.com