Be My Valentine...or, maybe not?

So it's three days past Valentine's Day, which makes me happy only insofar as we are pretty much as far from next year's Valentine's Day as we can get. For many people, Valentine's Day is an expression of affection, of love and loyalty and romance. For others, it's a pressure cooker of expectations and fears and failures. And for people like me, it ranks somewhere on my personal hate scale in the neighborhood of bias crimes, stomach flu, and anything composed by Zoltan Kodaly. This is the holiday that comes in at number two on my list of Top Ten Most Hated Holidays, knocked out of the top spot only by my deep and abiding hate for New Year's Eve. But that's another post.

Valentine's Day rarely goes well for me. I had a decent one in 1988, when I received a white carnation from a dear friend of mine, which I carried with me the entire weekend as I was sitting for a scholarship exam at the college I would eventually attend. I got the scholarship, too. And I always believed it was because the carnation brought me good luck.

Since then, it's been pretty much downhill. It may be as a result of the fact that two of my most notorious breakups occurred either on, or as a result, of Valentine's Day deeds gone bad. It may also be that as a young admin assistant back in the 90s, I was heartily sickened by the fluttery coven of pink-suited sales managers whose roses I had to schlep from the front of the office to their desks. "For me?" they'd ask sweetly, as the whole damn sales group would flit and coo over to survey the new bouquet. And based on the floral content / presumed expense / sincerity of sentiment read aloud (with all the deep and dramatic sincerity of a wannabe starlet at an open call audition) from the enclosed card, you could practically see the Olympic-style judging going on in their faces.

I distinctly remember receiving a bouquet of my own one year - twelve long-stemmed yellow roses, my favorite flower. "Oh, but yellow roses only mean friendship," one of the coven declared dismissively. "I guess he doesn't really feel that way." It figured: if your gift, no matter how meaningful, didn't fit into their judging standard of red roses, chocolates, teddy bears and other consumerist cliches, it could only mean one thing -- to quote yet another consumerist cliche: He's just not that into you.

Then there was the year I was in grad school. I was really poor, in spite of my $425 a month studio apartment in Society Hill. So for the month of January, I scrimped and saved, eating lentil soup and ramen noodles as I prepped for my comprehensives, all so I could make a really expensive and exquisite dinner for my boyfriend. Things, at the time, weren't going so well with us. He wasn't really the nicest person in the world to begin with -- we'd struggled for all of our college years with issues of fidelity (him), the subsequent depression (me), substance abuse (him), and pressure to marry (me, both sets of parents). And I'd literally had my head in a book for the past three months, and when I wasn't reading I was working on my thesis, working on papers for my literary critcism and theory courses, or working at my job as the Borders Story Lady. So I planned a dinner, hoping to rekindle the warmth along with promises of significant romantic attention from me, just as soon as my comprehensive exams were done.

I remember the menu as if it were yesterday: lobster risotto (yeah, I know - it was, after all, B.C. - before converting), steak, stuffed peppers, with chocolate truffles for dessert. All homemade. He arrived late, stayed long enough to eat dinner, and as he was walking out the door to meet up at a South Street bar with his buddies, he paid me an unexpected compliment: "It was good," he said, as he wiped the chocolate from his mouth and put on his coat. "But you cut the peppers the wrong way."

I broke up with him shortly thereafter. I also thought a restraining order would have been a nice touch, but I didn't have the money for a lawyer at the time.

Then there was the Valentine Havdalah Disaster of 2005: It started fairly harmlessly, when my alleged fiance-to-be asked me what I wanted as a Valentine's gift. I picked out a havdalah set from Israel. I figured, hey, it was different, and it wasn't that expensive. But, again, things weren't all that great between us. We'd been fighting a lot; he hated his job, I adored mine; I had just gotten a big raise, he was struggling financially...it was one of those times. Which, incidentally, gives me great empathy for any person who is coping with a partner who thinks that they are worthless right now because they are jobless or under-earning or just plain defeated by the current economic crisis...it's not good, and it can kill a relationship stone dead. Just like it did in my case.

Here's how it happened: Valentine's Day arrived, with no sign of my havdalah set. Two weeks later, it still hadn't arrived. I asked my F-T-B what was up. And so the conversation went something like this:

Me: So, did you ever check on the shipping for the Havdalah set? It still hasn't gotten here.

FTB: Well, um, yeah. I know.

Me: So you checked on it?

FTB: No, I never actually got around to ordering it.

Me: What? You told me you ordered it two weeks ago.

FTB: Well, do you remember back in November, when I woke you up because I really needed to talk to you about my job situation?

Me: I think so? Was it when you woke me up at four in the morning, on the day I was moving to the new apartment?

FTB: Yeah, that's it.

Me: And we had just gone to bed at 2AM because I was packing? Which would have taken a much shorter time if you'd have helped me?

FTB: (sheepishly) uh huh.

Me: And we had to be up at 6AM for the movers? So I asked if we could talk later?

FTB: (raising voice) No, not exactly. You yelled at me.

Me: Well, that's not surprising.

FTB: You yelled at me! Your exact words were, "Are you still going to hate your job at 9AM? Because maybe you can continue your f*cking whining then."

Me: Yeah, that sounds about right I mean, you'd been talking about it for hours. And we really needed to get some sleep.

FTB: Well, be that as it may, I don't think you were being a very good girlfriend. So I decided not to get you a Valentine's Day present.

(pause)

Me: I see. I think we should maybe take a break.

*******************************************

And that was it. I broke up with the tool two weeks later. Which, I think, showed admirable restraint on my part. It would have been sooner, but unfortunately, I had other things to deal with, like my dad dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in the interim. It did, however, give me the opportunity to say, when FTB came crawling back, asking me to give him another chance: "Actually, my dad HATED you."

So, no, I'm not really a fan of Valentine's Day. I'd like to feel differently about it, but I don't think I ever will. Some of you might think it is just Single Girl Bitterness(tm) on my part, but I don't think it is that simple. I've been on all the sides of the equation, in love, out of love, feeling like I should be in love when I'm not, wishing I were in love but not really ready to open my heart, knowing that I probably do love someone but that I'm sort of useless as a partner right now, I have only this to say: I don't think I would want to be with anyone who would comply with a once-a-year tribute on a day when everyone else is saying the same exact thing. If I ever am lucky enough to be beloved of someone wonderful, and I feel the same way about him, then I really hope and pray that we will be best friends and lovers and everything imaginable to one another every day, and that I will know how to distinguish my own emotions and expectations from what the Valentine-industrial complex is telling me I ought to be feeling.

So this year I did the things I love most: I wrote for a couple of hours. I studied some Torah. I went for a walk in Manor Park and petted every friendly dog I ran into. I bought myself some ridiculously expensive French cheese and watched Law and Order. And breathed a huge sigh of relief that I didn't have anyone expecting the peppers to be cut a certain way, or for me to wake up in the middle of the night to listen to the same damn complaining about a situation he was doing nothing to improve. This year, I could just be me, with no one's expectations but my own. And isn't that a sort of celebration?