For the first twenty two years of my life, Valentine’s Day held this implicit promise that once I was in a relationship in February, the Earth would split open and spit out butterflies and rainbows. Every new February brought the same promise and the same stress…
Who would be my Valentine?
In elementary school, we were required to bring Valentines for everyone if we brought them at all. This often made Valentine giving rather ordinary. Despite these constraints, I’d sort out the Valentines my mother had purchased for me and decide who was getting which one. ”You are too cool!” went to friends. “Have a rockin’ Valentine’s Day!” went to acquaintances. And “Hugs and Kisses” went to those boys I had my eye on during the pre-Valentine’s Day rush. Every once in awhile, I’d sneak some extra candy into the bag intended for my current crush. I’d also sign the card differently depending on the strength of the crush.
Thank God my mother never did this. I did have a friend who did once and I totally fell for it.
I’m not sure anyone noticed or cared about the attention to detail I put into my Valentine’s Day activities at such a young age, though it occurs to me that someone should have noticed the amount of time I spent holed up in my room the night of the 13th.
In high school various student groups would sell flowers to raise money for their activities. You could purchase a flower the week prior and have it sent to someone during fifth hour on Valentine’s Day. Without fail, I would wait for the flower delivery with the same kind of dread and desire that one has while waiting for grades or test results. I did get some flowers in different years, but they were always from friends. While I appreciated the gesture, I was always waiting for that one flower to come in with a secret admirer tag on it just for me.
In college, I simply gave up on Valentine’s Day at first. In fact, my most memorable Valentine’s Day was one spent in the campus that I ran with my co-worker. We ate candy and blared J. Geils Band’s “Love Stinks” throughout the building. I actually had more fun that day than I had in all of my previous Valentine’s Days combined.
Cindy and Scott got married. Well WHOOPEDI DO!
The following year I started producing The Vagina Monologues as part of the V-Day program set up by Eve Ensler. As part of the program, we bought chocolate vaginas (yes, they make those…and they’re delicious) and talked about the empowerment of women. It was brilliant and fun.
But it still didn’t capture the elementary school vision of what I thought Valentine’s Day should be.
When I met The Mister, I expected this all to change. And to be honest, I can’t remember our first Valentine’s Day together. I can remember many other things, but that one doesn’t really ring a bell. In the years of our courtship and marriage that followed, we’ve had enjoyable Valentine’s Days, but given the expectations I had set up when I was nine, nothing quite measured up. In fact, when I was working at the law firm and completely stressed around Valentine’s Day one year, I gave up all pretenses and gave The Mister fifty dollars cash. Yes, you read that right: CASH. I apparently just gave up altogether.
This year, The Mister is going out of town for work on Valentine’s Day. We had a nice dinner this weekend (read: pigging out at Famous Dave’s with two appetizers AND dessert!), but nothing overtly romantic. Tonight I’ll be having dinner with my mother, which actually sounds really nice and doesn’t disappoint me at all. In fact, I think it lets me off the hook from this unbelievable sense of expectation that I had been building up for twenty some years. There’s no wishing for a secret admirer to send me a flower. There’s no pretense about what Valentine I’m giving to which classmate. There’s just a lot of pink and red in the drugstore and love songs on the radio.
Now the question arises: if I could go back and talk to myself in elementary school, would I save myself the yearly heartache of not having a Valentine?
As much as I’d love to save myself the pain, I don’t think I would. I might tell myself to value certain love interests differently, but I wouldn’t give up the ghost of Valentine’s Day. The magic of childhood–when we can capture it–is that we believe in a world where these kinds of daily miracles can happen. It’s one thing to not have that kind of magic at the age of thirty, but it’s quite another to lose it at the age of ten. Sure, those expectations set me up for letdown every single time…but they also taught me what I needed to appreciate something. Without those empty flower deliveries or unrequited Valentine’s sentiments, I may never have appreciated the ones I finally got as an adult…even if the sentiment was “let’s order TWO appetizers.”
I don’t hate Valentine’s Day like Liz Lemon–though I’ve had just as many (if not more) let downs. I don’t love it like Hallmark. I just see it as another day on which my young self built up expectations that I had to correct as an adult. I could be mad about the extra work I had to do to get through adolescence with this sense of impending romance, but honestly I’m not. I had fun picking out the specific cards that would go to various people. I had fun sending my friends flowers so they didn’t have to sit through flower delivery with nothing to show. I had fun blaring J. Geils Band throughout a hundred-year-old building. It may not have been the fun I expected, but it was the fun I needed.
The Earth never opens up and spits out butterflies and rainbows. It probably never will. But at least I’ve learned to appreciate the nights when I imagined it could.
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