On Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day

Yes, that time of the year is creeping up on us. Valentine’s Day – that day of romance that places so much pressure on us. For those of us who are single, we feel the pressure to find a date, someone to spend Valentine’s Day with. For those of us who have settled down, we feel the pressure to make this day “special”. As if all the rest of the days of the year are not special enough with the people we love.

I’m not a big fan of Valentine’s Day. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I hate February. It is my least favorite month of the year. I certainly don’t perceive it as the most romantic month of the year. Or perhaps because growing up, the pressure at school to have a valentine was no less intense as it is in the adult life. I don’t recall having any confessions of love, or gifts from secret or not so secret admirers. Nevertheless receiving gifts from assigned secret valentines in school was usually faced in trepidation. I dreaded the boxes of message hearts that I couldn’t eat (they tasted like chalk to me anyways) and the kitschy Russell Stover chocolate filled heart boxes that tasted like crap.  Valentine’s Day, over the years, had come to mean a Hallmark holiday for me. A day filled with consumerism, and unoriginal cliché gifts consisting of ‘1 bouquet of red roses, a box of chocolates and a card bought from the nearest pharmacy’. I viewed Valentine’s Day and all the white bears holding red satin pillows like the way I viewed girly mangas in the bookstore. I abhorred them.

My one good memory of Valentine’s Day with a Secret Valentine extends far back to 6^th grade. My secret valentine could not come to school because he was sick, but worried that I would feel left out when the other children received their presents. His mother dropped my present off at school. He had written a riddle, which I was to decipher to guess his identity, and a bag of sour heart shaped gummies. I was touched by his worry about my feelings, and the thought he had put into a gift. I never really had to decipher the code although I certainly tried, because my house advisor informed me that this particular student’s mother had dropped off my gift. And the bag of gummies was certainly the perfect gift; because that was exactly the kind of candy I liked to eat.

So yes, I am still a little bit of a Valentine’s Day cynic. Trying to recreate the feeling of romance in my household consisted of me buying a card for my mother and asking my dad to sign it. I always made sure to do something extra nice for my mom on Valentine’s Day, like buy her flowers, because typical romantic gestures do not exist between my parents. My dad would always remember to buy flowers or cards for his mother, but somehow I was the filler between my parents. My mother always knew that I was behind the flowers and the cards, and she would always tell me to stop wasting my time, but I knew that receiving something nice on those days would still make her feel better inside.

By the time I entered college, not only was I a Valentine’s Day cynic, but also cynical about love in general. I’d been in love once. It ended horribly in the way that Scarlett O’Hara realizes that all this time she’s been in love with a dream. I’d fallen in love with the boy I met, and I’d stayed in love with him for 3 years … only to find out one day that he’d grown into someone else. I shocked everyone in my junior year American Lit HS class by announcing during our discussion of The Age of Innocence that perhaps love doesn’t really exist. I certainly didn’t believe it did. This declaration was met with loud gasps of horror from my female classmates. I definitely felt my male classmate, someone well liked by all the girls in our school, tense up in unease to my right. I went on to explain that I believed that you could fall in love with someone in a moment. But people change, and they grow, and you don’t necessarily stay in love with that person whom they become. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in love, I just didn’t believe in love forever. To love somebody, and to keep loving them as they grew and changed was an extraordinary, rare, and near impossible feat in my mind. It made sense then that I would sympathize with Newland Archer, a man who chose the safe option, who found that it was possible to be content without loving his wife, who chose to continue to let his dream woman live in the recesses of his mind at the ending of the novel.

With this mindset, I entered college, vowing never to find love, but to find safety and peace. Someone who could not hurt me if I did not love him, who could only offer me friendship and stability. I would have my fun while I was young, not needing to commit myself until I was ready. I never thought I would encounter love again.

The first time I decided I was ready for a relationship, it worked out disastrously. We met through a mutual friend. We talked online, and met a second time, and then third, and on his birthday we officially became a couple. Our short-lived relationship (which ironically has also been my second longest relationship) was mostly long distance. It was also to be my first Valentine’s Day with a real romantic interest. I dreaded it because Valentine’s Day has always seemed to be a test to me. A test of ‘how much do you really care?’ and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to find out. The red roses, the heart filled with candy, the generic card have always said to me ‘you women are all the same. I really couldn’t be bothered to find out what you really like.’

Even so, I learned that there are worse things than receiving cliché presents. My boyfriend informed me that I was to accompany him to his frat party for Valentine’s Day. I couldn’t believe that our plans for Valentine’s Day consisted of attending a frat party, something which required me to travel 4 hours home on the bus the day before. We ended up going to a frat party that night, after which I was informed that since we had already attended a frat party, we could do ‘other stuff’ on the night of Valentine’s Day. Waking up the next day and finding his friend hiding out in the room preparing to surprise his girlfriend with gifts was a nasty wake up call. Said friend tried to reassure me that all my boyfriend could talk about was what to get me. It was hard to be reassured when said boyfriend looked at the teddy bear bearing lollipops and asked me where he could find a stuffed animal store in flushing. A teddy bear bearing lollipops was perfect for his friend’s girlfriend who was very much into cute things. Not so perfect for me.

All my worst fears about Valentine’s Day came true. Before leaving for New York, I had just wanted to stay at college, celebrating with my girlfriends. I hadn’t stayed because I didn’t want to disappoint this boy who claimed he loved me. He loved his version of me, someone who was cute, and Asian. In the end, he bought me a kitschy gift basket from a peddler on the street. A gift that said ‘I put no thought or effort into this’, and worse a gift that said ‘I don’t know you at all’. He described the gift, equipped with white teddy bear embracing red satin pillow and stale candy as ‘perfect’ for me and exclaimed that he knew I would love it. Not wanting to ruin the moment for him, I merely nodded and smiled.

After that, our relationship quickly ended. I started dating Dede, and I was re-acquainted with love. Being with Dede taught me to appreciate cute things. Well, that, and Etsy. Last year’s Etsy was filled abound with wonderfully cute and unique presents. I still hold some of my same views about Valentine’s Day. I just don’t really like red roses in general. I still think Russell Stover’s chocolates taste like crap. I’m more likely to buy a box of message hearts, spell out stuff on cupcakes, and make Dede eat them. Many of the Valentine’s Day gift ideas reflect the consumerism and materialism that just confuses me. Why is a red wallet on a list of Valentine’s presents? Where is the romance in that? A wallet is a present I think of for Christmas, or a birthday. The red color does not make it romantic to me, but that’s my personal opinion.

Valentine’s Day is supposed to be a day of love, not a day of red or pink colored things that you can buy for someone’s birthday, or for Christmas, or for Mother’s Day. Valentine’s Day is supposed to be about making the people you love feel special, about spending time with them, showing them that you put time and effort into your plans because you care about them. What you do on Valentine’s Day shows how much you know about another person, and whether you’ve been listening to them. If he or she wants the wallet, then get it not because a magazine says that this is a good idea for a present, but because you know that this is something that your significant other has been wanting for a long time. If she doesn’t like roses, then find out what flowers she does like. Maybe your significant other wants a romantic piece of jewelry, or maybe they want you to record yourself singing romantic songs. Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean you’re limited to choosing from the floral arrangements online, or the Valentine’s themed candy, or to the colors red and pink. Maybe you guys want to make penguins out of modeling clay.

Having tried to find new ideas online, and just recycling through last years posts and this year’s lists of material goods, I’ve decided that I’m going to make my own Valentine’s Day idea posts this year.