I am giving up hating Valentine's Day. Celebrating love is a beautiful thing
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Version 0 of 1. It is not every year that I appreciate Valentine’s Day. I have been in relationships and hated Valentine’s Day; I have been single and hated Valentine’s Day. I have railed against the corporatization of love and romance and how Valentine’s Day is, largely, a marketing holiday designed to exploit rank consumerism. I have rolled my eyes at commercials for shopping mall jewelry stores because I know for a fact that every kiss does not begin with Kay. This year, I am surrendering to Valentine’s Day – willingly. It is far too exhausting to invest so much energy in disliking a holiday that, at its purest, is designed to celebrate love. I have never been married. I don’t know if I will ever marry, though I hope to. When I am asked why I have not married, I explain that my parents have been happily married for 42 years. The bar feels so very high for that kind of commitment. I could instead confess that, for far too long, I was in love with the idea of love – the idea that you could find someone who would love you back and do so unconditionally; that they would love you perfectly and would always sweep you off your feet; and that once you found love, all would be right with the whole of your world. I read too many romance novels during my formative years. I have a penchant for romantic comedies. I understand why Romeo and Juliet came to such a pass. I was in love with the idea of love, so I created elaborate fictions for my relationships – fictions that allowed me to believe that what any given paramour and I shared looked a lot like love. I would say, “I love you” as if the words were currency, as if they could force the objects of my affection to genuinely reciprocate those feelings. Things always, inevitably, fell apart in these relationships. Or I could confess that I used to take romantic advice very seriously. I believed in things like “the rules”. I did not imagine then that love could be improbable, unexpected, extraordinarily messy. I knew things about love and I knew these things with certainty, and anything that contradicted what I knew about love I believed could not possibly be true. Now I know love and I know nothing about love. Everything I once knew with certainty means nothing at all. I love but I am not entirely sure how to be loved, how to be seen and known for the utterly flawed woman I am. It demands surrender. It demands acknowledging that I am not perfect but, perhaps, I deserve affection anyway. Sometimes, strangers say that they love me, and I cringe because they cannot possibly feel so intensely about me. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself, though I have to allow for the possibility that perhaps they do love me. I must respect that they are choosing their words. I must surrender to that, too. Love is a powerful emotion and it is a powerful word, but we often use it so carelessly. “I love Channing Tatum”, I like to say because I am very fond of his persona and his looks. (My goodness, I am fond of that neck.) But do I love him, in the truest sense of the word? I do not. I love my phone. I love this pair of shoes I saw the other day. I love sleep. There are degrees of love, I suppose. I don’t know that I will ever stop being careless in how I use the word love; I don’t mind such recklessness. But, when I use the word with care, my intent is clear. When I use the word, I feel certainty even if that certainty stands on fragile ground. I am saying I see you and you see me and I am terrified and I am exhilarated and I refuse to look away. |