February 14 is supposed to be a day to
celebrate love. Too bad our writers don't love it.
Why?
Not Enough Privacy by
Sarah Hepola
It's hard to find a holiday more disparaged than Valentine's Day.
For today's cynical postromantics, February 14 has turned into a
sour little celebration of self-pity, complete with
anti-Valentine's Day parties and general grousing. Not that I blame
them, really: Over the years, Valentine's Day has brought me little
but anxiety and chin pimples. It doesn't matter whether or not I'm
in a relationship; it's the kind of saccharine holiday that makes
me want to find two people in love, congratulate them on their
success, and crack an egg over their stupid coneheads. But it
doesn't have to be like this. See, the problem with Valentine's
isn't the holiday itself. (What's wrong with setting aside one day
a year to honor romance? Most of us spend the other 364 burning it
in effigy.) The problem is the way we celebrate it. It's too
public, too vulgar for such an emotion as love. Valentine's Day is
something to keep behind closed doors, between two consenting
adults. Wanna celebrate your special romance this Valentine's Day?
I applaud you. I encourage you. Now get a room already.
Like many neuroses, my problems with Valentine's Day began in high
school. Charities like
Amnesty International raised money hawking
$1 carnations that would be delivered to recipients in homeroom.
The idea was to flaunt them all day in your lapels and hair, a
metric of your popularity, attractiveness, and worth. For shy,
bookish girls like me, this was a special kind of torture, like
being forced to pace the halls with your weight pinned to your
chest. (Let's hope Amnesty at least freed a few pistol-whipped
Albanians for all the suburban angst this ritual caused.) Usually,
I got one lousy carnation from my best friend - a sweet gesture,
but a little like being asked to the prom by your older cousin.
Miraculously, I did get a high school boyfriend, and eagerly
awaited mid-February, although my expectations dissolved when he
decided carnations were stupid and merely showed up at my house
that afternoon with a Gap gift certificate. Oh, well.
As I grew older, the game shifted, but not much. In every office I
ever worked in, Valentine's Day played out the same way. Some woman
receives a gorgeous bouquet of roses. Other women hover around her
desk, pretending not to hate her. Then those women return to their
desks and stab themselves through the eye with letter openers.
Roses are a lovely (if somewhat trite) gesture - but what's wrong
with giving them at home?
Christmas presents aren't usually sent to
work. Birthday presents aren't usually sent to work. So why do
people parade their Valentine's Day presents around the watercooler
like last night's concert T-shirt?
Of course, when I say people, I mean women. I've never met a man
who cared about Valentine's Day, which is another one of the
holiday's gross failings. It has become synonymous with frilly,
girly things - chocolate teddy bears and diamond pendants and silk
hearts trimmed with lace, all of which should be rounded up and
burned to, I don't know, fuel some third-world country. If
Valentine's is ever to be more than a Hallmark cliché, it has to
lose its doily image. It should be a holiday for both sexes to
enjoy. Why not plan a trip together? Take an adventure you've
always talked about but never really done? That's the kind of thing
it's good for - helping you both make good on promises, grab at
experiences you might not otherwise go after. To make a better,
stronger relationship.
Okay, I realize that, for most of us, Valentine's Day will remain
the minor annoyance it has always been - a cause for worry,
bitterness, and bounced checks. It's hard to make such a
commodified day into a private affair. It's hard to find a gift
mutually fulfilling and unique. So if all else fails, just buy an
iPod Nano. For the one you love, even if that happens to be
you.
Too Many Memories by Kevin Raub
It was with admitted hesitation that I took on the assignment of
writing an essay about Valentine's Day. I explained to my editor
that I recently saw the end of a serious relationship that lasted
nearly a decade and had ended gut-wrenchingly only months prior,
and that I probably wasn't the best contributor to sing the praises
of Valentine's Day, Cupid, or anything at all having to do with a
union of two people.
Then I started to think about it.
I'll skip the modesty part here and say right from go that dating
has never been one of the things I had any trouble with. I've had a
girlfriend - not the same one, mind you - since I was about 14. I
don't generally do the dating-around thing. I'm a relationship kind
of guy, and I have been in some serious ones over the years. I feel
better about myself when I'm sharing life with another, and I get
into less trouble. I consider myself a romantic (though not a
helpless one), which is why I was shocked when I discovered that I
don't really have a single Valentine's Day memory of note. Not one.
Nada.
Sticking with the age-14 time line, that's more or less 18
Valentine's Days I'm quite sure I spent with someone I loved,
dining in romantic restaurants, walking hand-in-hand along
seashores and quaint city streets, opening cutesy presents,
exchanging heated hugs and kisses, and
curling up on the couch at
night's end and saying things like "I love you this much" and
stretching my arms as wide as they could possibly go.
I'm positive that these things happened. Really. I don't work for
Hallmark - these are true stories! But someone must have dug deep
inside the part of my brain marked "February 14" and pressed Purge.
However, as anyone who knows a thing or two about trashing computer
files can tell you, they are never truly gone. I wanted to recover
my Valentine's Day files, or, at the very least, find out where the
heck they all went.
I figured I had two routes available to me to accomplish this. I
could make a year-by-year list of girlfriends I've had since 1986,
track them down, and ask them what we did for Valentine's Day this
year and that year.
But I figured that was too Nick Hornby, as well as borderline
stalkerish. So, naturally, that left one choice: hypnotism.
Since at the time of this writing I was spending a month in Brazil
- you know, to find a new girlfriend - this proved a challenging
task. Not only did I need a hypnotist (not exactly filling as many
yellow pages as dating services and psychologists), but one who
spoke English as well. A friend pointed me to Dr. Leonard Verea and
his namesake institute, Instituto Verea/Sociedade Brasileira de
Hipnose Clínica e Dinâmica (Verea Institute/Brazilian Society of
Clinical Hypnosis and Dynamics).
In slightly broken English, Dr. Verea probed my feelings about
Valentine's Day and love. Do I associate the two? Of course. Is it
an important day to me? It can be. If I don't remember any recent
Valentine's Days, do I at least possess memories of other days in
my most recent relationship? Sure. How about February 10? No
way.
Dr. Verea concluded, after additional probing, that I associate
love with my last relationship (true), and that once the
relationship ended, all of my memories of things I associated with
love vanished along with it. Right. Down. The. Drain.
Fair enough. But could I get them back? "If you do not want to
remember, nobody can make you remember," he told me. An entirely
different question altogether, and one that prompted another query:
Did I really want to remember the memories themselves, or did I
simply want to know why I didn't remember them?
After a brief exercise that vaguely recalled what people generally
think of as hypnotism (i.e., what people see on TV, with dangling
watches and counts of three and such - for the most part, this is
fiction), Dr. Verea had me stand up, concentrate on a small eye
hanging from the ceiling, and imagine a great force blowing me
over. I fell back in his arms. It was an exercise in trust, which I
passed. I then sat down and the doctor went through a series of
relaxation and mind-opening exercises, ending with a proclamation
that when I went to sleep that evening, "You can remember. You will
remember."
I didn't.
What all of this leads me to believe is the following: Since I have
been traveling extensively for a slew of magazines for the last six
years, I have come to love countries, not women. This Valentine's
Day, I'll be in
New Zealand. Surely I will remember that.
Too Much Pressure by John Gonzalez
The truth is, I hate effort. Really, I hate anything that even
remotely resembles effort. Call me lazy if you like, but I just
don't want to be bothered with, you know, doing stuff.
Halloween parties, for example, are always a huge problem for me.
First, unless the party is held on my couch - and, for some reason,
it never is - then I'm usually not big on the idea because it
involves me getting up off my couch to go to a location that is
clearly not my couch. So there's that little problem. Then there's
the notion that all good Halloween-party guests wear
interesting/clever costumes. I hate that, too, and I generally
rebel against it.
But compared with Valentine's Day,
Halloween is the equivalent of a
lazy Sunday afternoon. Valentine's Day is akin to a busy Monday -
complete with meetings with your boss and demands by the company
brass that you produce a quality work product, and quickly …
or
else. Valentine's Day is a snarling beast of physical and
mental exertion. It pretends to be about love and good deeds, but
it's actually about stress and inadequacies.
I hate Valentine's Day. I hate it because it makes me, you know, do
stuff. And you already know how I feel about that.
The problem with Valentine's Day - aside from the fact that it
comes around annually - is that it's sneaky. Or at least it allows
my girlfriend to be sneaky. Each year, she tells me that she
doesn't need anything, that so long as I get her a card, she's
happy. Of course, that's not true. Ignoring the fact that when she
says "get me a card," she really means "bring me two of everything
and one helper monkey to carry it all," I'm also terrible at 1)
actually picking out a suitable card and 2) writing a message that
she'll find satisfactory on said card.
And don't think that I'm okay with the receiving end but not the
giving. I'd be perfectly happy to adopt a no-gift policy on any and
all holidays. A no-anything policy, really. My perfect Valentine's
Day would include as little movement - and this will shock you -
from my couch as possible.
But here's the thing: I'm not a monster. I'm not numb to the fact
that I come up woefully short each year in the Valentine's Day
department. Last year, even though we had agreed to keep things
simple, my girlfriend got me tickets to see
Jerry Seinfeld. She's
the best. Which, apparently, makes me the worst; I had planned to
send her a very thoughtful e-card, but I couldn't figure out the
process because I'm computer illiterate. I tried explaining to her
how technology is love's archenemy - using a very romantic
Joker-to-Batman analogy - but that didn't go over so hot.
So this year, I have two different Valentine's Day plans. All I
have to do is pick one and execute it. And since I don't want any
men out there who might be reading this to disappoint their girls,
either, I freely offer my ideas to the masses.
1) Change all calendars that she might stumble upon to April. Begin
wearing shorts and remarking on how the weather is "so warm."
Barbecue outdoors. When she asks what you're doing and where the
two of you are headed for Valentine's Day, say things like "you're
crazy, honey" and "February was months ago; only crazy people would
say things like that." Emphasize the word
crazy - because if
I know anything about women, it's that they enjoy when you imply
that they're mentally unstable. Then, change the subject. Tell her
Arbor Day is upon you, and that everyone knows "Arbor Day is for
lovers."
2) Break up. Then immediately flee - preferably to a country with
no extradition treaty.
Too Much … Okay, Okay, It's Not So Bad by Elena Rover
Even though wonderful things tend to happen to me on holidays - I
met my future husband on Halloween; my son got his first tooth on
Christmas Day - I am always stressed about the expectations that
come with any red-letter day. As if by magic, these designated days
are supposed to be exceptional. On Mother's Day, I'm to revel in
the joys of parenthood even if my toddler is throwing his lunch
across the room or woke me every two hours the night before because
his molars were erupting. On my birthday, I'm supposed to take note
of how different it feels to be one year older even if I feel
exactly as I did the day before (and to be honest, I don't feel
much different on the inside than I did at age six). Then there's
the biggest abomination, New Year's Day, ripe with "meaning" about
the year gone by and the one just beginning. Ugh.
In my opinion, Valentine's Day wins for Most Awkward Holiday. Days
designed for romance have not been my friend over the years. First
there was the span of singledom, made more painful and poignant
when the calendar indicated an evening meant for romance. With a
new boyfriend (and there were plenty of those), there was always
the strain of deciding how big to go on the gift - were cuff links
too cliché? Would the present I picked remind him of his hideous
ex? What was the perfect measure of my esteem and appreciation,
neither so generous to cause discomfort nor so stingy that I didn't
seem to care?
And then there was the question of flowers, by far the worst part.
Don't get me wrong; I love flowers. But I love them so much I spent
five years during high school and college working at a florist
shop. That's five Februarys of fingers blackened, chapped, and sore
from stripping thorns from the stems of thousands of roses lest
they prick the fingers of the giver's beloved. Five years of
watching the price of roses double overnight thanks to incessant
demand on that one day. As February 14 approached, I'd see every
roadside stand burst with blooms - and offer a silent prayer that I
would not be a recipient of a $100 bunch. But how could I convey to
the new man in my life that roses just aren't for me without
sounding demanding or difficult?
After I met my future husband on that auspicious Halloween, he
quickly learned that I was "not going to be easy to date." New to
town, he researched a special evening consisting of a recently
opened restaurant and a fun show. Of course, I'd eaten at the hot
spot a week before. And although I don't run in theater circles,
I'd chanced to see the play with the author and producer, who
happened to be friends of a friend. Always game for a challenge, my
future husband tried again, with better luck the second time.
A few months later, when Valentine's Day arrived, he passed the
gift gauntlet with flair. That morning, I awoke to find an adorable
stuffed dog on my bedside table; his collar was a gold necklace. My
future husband had put together a creative gift, and it was jewelry
- which is always a hit. That little dog remained perched in my
bedroom through our engagement and marriage. He got lost for the
five years we lived in our first house, but we had a happy reunion
when we unpacked in our new home last summer. The dog's now a
favorite with our toddler, when he's not too busy to pay attention
to his toys because he's tossing his macaroni.
But last year was the best Valentine's yet. I have to admit that I
don't even recall what I got. The memorable part was the messenger:
my pint-size "little love," as I call him. My teetering new walker
delivered my gifts, along with a big smile and a hug. Maybe there's
hope for this holiday yet. With no fear of roses or loneliness, and
the added joy of two boys to make it delicious, I'm beginning to
see the appeal. And hey, there's always chocolate!
Authors
Sarah Hepola is a freelance writer based in
New York City.
If you send her a Valentine's Day card, address it to "Smoky."
Kevin Raub is a Los Angeles-based travel and entertainment
journalist. His work has appeared in
Travel+Leisure,
FHM,
Stuff, and the
New York Post, among
others. He wishes to take this opportunity to apologize to any
ex-girlfriends who might be reading this.
John Gonzalez is a staff writer for
Boston magazine, and is
actually a sweet and thoughtful guy - as long as he's on his
couch.
Elena Rover is a freelance health writer and editor based in
Katonah, New York, where the possibility of a decent Valentine's
Day still exists.