As soon as Duane Reade and CVS start stocking their shelves with
red and pink paraphernalia I start feeling Valentine’s Day’s inevitable
imminence in the winter wind that sweeps chills beneath the sleeves of my coat,
up the skin of my arms, down my neck, beneath my scarf, down to the thin skin
of my chest that my shirt leaves bare. I
contemplate Valentine’s Day even while January still clings to the
calendar. I used to dread it because I
was perplexed by it. Now I think I get
it.
Since I started high school, I wondered what kind of people
celebrate Valentine’s Day. What kind of
woman received flowers or jewelry or a heartfelt card and what kind of man
gives such things? What kind of couple
goes to dinner in a candlelit restaurant or has particularly romantic sex that
evening? I wondered who these people
are, why they celebrate this holiday and if it means anything. I thought maybe
Valentine’s Day is a holiday for commonplace love, not the kind of love the
French troubadours sang of in the lyrics of hope and tragedy, eroticism and
intellectualism; not the kind of love I wanted.
But then I wondered if all love is paradoxically both rare and
commonplace?
When I was a freshman in college I told my first boyfriend that I
didn’t believe in celebrating Valentine’s Day.
I said that it’s tacky and superficial.
And I wished I meant it. I reminded myself of the fact that I don’t care
for chocolate nor for the clichéd cards usually found near the pharmacy inside
CVS. But, really, I was just saying it for
the same reason I always told anyone I ever dated that I didn’t need anything
for Christmas or my birthday: I felt like loving me must be so much trouble
that no one needed to go to any extra trouble just because it’s a holiday.
When I was little I unabashedly enjoyed Valentine’s Day. I enjoyed eating boxes and boxes of
Conversation Hearts, after first organizing the hearts by color and then by
what they said so that I could save the best tasting, most romantic one for
last. One year when I was very young, my grandmother came to my house with several
boxes of art supplies and we spent the afternoon cutting and pasting and
drawing and writing and glittering. My
grandmother made heart people out of paper and lace and Popsicle sticks and I
wrote love poems on crepe paper that I had cut into heart shapes and then
covered in glitter and pasted onto lace doilies. It was a beautiful, lace-trimmed holiday that
I enjoyed every time it came around for many youthful years.
Two years ago, after some turbulent teenage and early adulthood years
of denying the holiday, I realized that Valentine’s Day is probably the perfect
holiday for me. After all, I love Love -- even as I grow increasingly
wary of it over the years. I love a
truly great kiss – the kind of kiss that seems to touch every part of my body
simultaneously while momentarily rendering me unable to move words from my mind
to my lips. And I love slipping my hand
into the warm grasp of another’s at the end of a long day. I love when love is new and feels as if any
love that may have ever existed in my heart prior was lesser or just plain
wrong as the new love sparks unfathomable, glittering brightness as my beloved
and I walk together down the street or move together between bed sheets. And I love when love has grown a bit and is
happy to stay in bed on a Sunday, watching TV and reading the news. And even though I don’t necessarily believe
in happily ever after, I love the possibility that I might be proven wrong. Sometimes it’s just nice to be in love with a
possibility.
The truth is that in my heart of hearts, I believe in Valentine’s
Day. I believe it is important to
celebrate love. Love. Love in the abstract
and love in the tangible touch of someone you love and who loves you back. Love as sex and love as sitting quietly
together on a park bench. I think it is
good to be the people who give and receive flowers and heartfelt cards, the
people who sit together in candlelit restaurants, who put a little extra effort
into their appearance and pay a little extra attention to detail in bed that
night. I think it is important to show
that in spite of the texts sometimes left unanswered and the many miscommunications,
the silly arguments, the nights you slept on opposite ends of the bed, and all
the times you were too tired or too preoccupied with something else that love
still means something – still means everything.
And so, two years ago I celebrated my first Valentine’s Day with
the first person I was head over heels in love with. We had dinner and drinks at the same small
taqueria on the Lower East Side where we had our first date. He gave me a sweet, silly card and heart
shaped box of champagne truffles from Teuscher.
I gave him a handmade card and a short story I had written. After dinner we wandered the Lower East Side
and decided to have cosmos (I wanted one because they’re pink) at a musty little
pub called No Fun. Sitting at the almost
empty bar together, we were in what felt like it would be a happily ever
after. And by that I mean it felt
right. Valentine’s Day was what we made
it and ours was like us – unplanned yet heartfelt, worth the trouble but
willing to take it easy. We held hands at the bar and asked the bartender to take
our photograph. The picture came out
bright blurry, the camera’s flash dances upon the bar lights and the
streetlights behind our heads, a halo-like glow turns our faces gold. We look happy. It was love: paradoxically rare and
commonplace.
Maybe Valentine’s Day isn’t as important when you’re eighteen or twenty
and in college, and your real world consists of studying and drinking and
dreaming up all the possibilities that you’d like to fall in love with. But it
is an important holiday when you’re even just a couple years older and in a
relationship. The truth is that the
reservation you make for February 14th, the words you write in the
card, and the extra romance is all an effort you make to celebrate something
that is the best thing that has ever happened to you, or at least something
that is making you superbly happy.
And I know people say that Valentine’s Day makes people who aren’t
in a relationship feel bad about themselves, but I don’t think that’s a reason
not to celebrate it. After all, there
are more people than one might think who don’t have a family with whom to spend
Christmas or Thanksgiving, or good friends with whom to celebrate their
birthday. And what about all the single
people with no one to kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve? I think most holidays have the potential to
make some people feel excluded, but I also think there is always reason to
celebrate it you look for it.
Valentine’s Day is neither tacky nor superficial, at heart. It is not an empty consumer driven holiday,
not necessarily. At its best, Valentine’s Day is a celebration of the very
thing that we are all most likely either longing for or taking for granted:
love.
