Personally, I’ve never liked it all that much.
It was fun in grade school when we got to hang paper mailboxes
on our desks and spend the afternoon goofing off and dropping
candy-filled envelopes into the red, white and pink creations.
Personally, I’ve never liked it all that much.
It was fun in grade school when we got to hang paper mailboxes on our desks and spend the afternoon goofing off and dropping candy-filled envelopes into the red, white and pink creations.
But somewhere around the time when it should have started getting good, it took a severe nose dive and just about every Valentine’s Day in my adult life has crashed and burned.
I don’t know what it is exactly, but over the past few years I’ve started to get the feeling that I’m one of those unlucky-in-love types who is forever cursed to spend hours on the phone with her mother asking the age-old question: When will love not suck?
Other than the fact that somewhere along the line I acquired the unenviable trait of being a jerk magnet (no matter where I go, the biggest jerk in a 50-mile radius seeks me out and convinces me to date him), even the few guys that weren’t in constant jerk-mode still gypped me on Valentine’s Day.
If there were awards for hearing lame excuses on Valentine’s Day, I would have boxes filled with trophies and plaques.
There’s the guilt-trip, starving student, “I don’t have any money right now, isn’t my love enough?” Or the bad boy, rebel without a cause, “That’s a holiday the candy and flower companies made up – I don’t conform to that crap.” Or they just got me something cliche and thoughtless like chocolate that I had to spend hours at the gym working off so they didn’t have a girlfriend with a fat ass.
But more often than not, most of my Valentine’s Days have passed without a bouquet of flowers or fattening box of chocolate from a sweetheart, and have left me sitting at home watching sappy romance movies on TBS and USA while cursing St. Valentine for starting the whole thing.
But I’m not bitter, and I’ll tell you why.
According to one legend, Valentine was a Roman priest in the third century who was martyred because of love.
The Emperor at the time, Claudius II, decided that single men made better soldiers than married men, so he outlawed marriage for young men.
A champion of true love, Valentine married young couples secretly in defiance of the Emperor’s heartless decree.
When he was discovered, he was put to death for his insurgence. But before his execution he fell in love with his jailer’s beautiful daughter, who visited him during his confinement.
Apparently, before he died he wrote her a love letter which he signed, “From your Valentine.”
Now all of that is very sweet and romantic, but if you choose to believe this particular legend (there are many different ones surrounding the enigmatic saint), after all that, Valentine was beheaded.
So basically, after starting something that has caused me years of torment and countless extra hours slaving away at the gym, he got what he deserved.
Of course, it’s easy to remember the bad Valentine’s Days because there are so many to fill my memory banks, but just to be fair to poor old, headless Valentine, I do have a couple of good memories associated with the holiday.
And fortunately for me and my seemingly loveless state of mind, they’re not just good Valentine’s Day memories, they’re great ones.
When I was a freshman in high school, Valentine’s Day netted me my very first kiss, which just happened to be with David Plunkett – an upperclassman whom I had the biggest crush on.
To this day, I don’t think I’ve had a crush that could even come close to equaling the magnitude of the one I had on David Plunkett.
Even though I saw him a few years ago, and he’s fat and not that cute anymore, nothing could ever take away from kissing him in the dimly lit foyer of my parent’s house – a white and red teddy bear clutched desperately in my hands as I locked them around his neck and hoped to God I was doing it right.
And there was the Valentine’s Day when my boyfriend at the time, Ben, wrote me a poem that truly took my breath away.
With his busy schedule he didn’t have time to print out a final draft and frame it until the day after Valentine’s Day, so I read the drafted copy that was scribbled on the back of an advertisement flyer.
I sat on the edge of his bed and read the poem that was written in several different colors of ink, with crossed out words and arrows directing me from scattered verse to verse – and as I looked up into his hesitant but expectant eyes, my heart was lodged firmly in my throat.
I still have that poem – the expensive piece of paper secured safely behind the glass of a fancy frame – and though I read it often, nothing will ever come close to reading that torn and creased piece of paper on that long ago Valentine’s Day, with the knowledge that I held his heart in my hands that day.
In retrospect, when you put the horrible Valentine’s Days and the great ones together, they exemplify the meaning of the holiday that sometimes gets lost in Hallmark cards and Hershey bars: Valentine’s Day, like the emotion it represents, is a crap shoot.
Between the good and the bad, the jerks and the gems, the bottom line is that it’s not about things or gifts, but about the little memories that, because of love, last a lifetime.
