This is not one of those bitter, sour grapes, woe-is-the single-me, anti-Valentine rants that peppers the blogosphere this time of year. I am a happily married man who just simply doesn’t understand all the fuss. My attitude towards Valentine’s Day is ambivalent at best. And YES, my wife really feels the same way. I checked. Today for instance, there will be no night at the opera, no candlelight dinner at Luigi’s, no stroll through the park where I will buy a rose from a rose-seller and offer it to her between my teeth. At the very most, we will walk down to The Nutty Chocolatier where I will watch patiently as Lisa nibbles at pieces of Lindt. And then we’ll cap the night off by cooking dinner and watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica (something she had no interest in at all, until the Sylon got pregnant). With the exception of the chocolate, this is pretty much what we do on a daily and weekly basis: dinner and TV and long walks together. (Sunday brunches too, Lisa wanted me to add this).
The seven years I have been with her, our relationship to me has been similar to the mindset we have when we travel together: lost in our own little world, and forced, when necessity demands, to search the local newspaper stands for the date. We’ve never been good at setting our relationship to any particular calendar.
Ok. The singles right now are thinking I am just being plain smug, and the married folks with kids are probably thinking I am being naive. Just wait until you have children! I can hear them say. But it’s really not that complicated or time consuming. Kallen Kitty sang about it more than fifty years ago:
Blow me a kiss from across the room
Say I look nice when I’m not
Touch my hair as you pass my chair
Little things mean a lot.
Not that I want my wife to touch my hair or blow me a kiss, but you get the idea. As cheesy as the lyrics sound, a little something every day is simpler than haggling with a babysitter and waiting in long line-ups for roses and pasta on one night a year.
The problem is we’ve been trained. Christmas is a time we set aside to be generous with our wealth and goodwill, and Valentine’s is a day designated for us to be generous with our love and affection. The first outcome to this is that most of us use these holidays as ways of making up for the all the chances we missed to treat each other well. The second outcome is, as a result, we will spend the rest of the year catching up with our visa bills.
Christian holidays are a blend of ancient ones. Elements of Valentine ’s Day had their origins in a Greco-Roman February holiday called Lupercalia. During this festival young men would run around the city (naked, some believe) whipping people with strips of goat skin. The act was said to perform two functions: to ward off evil and to increase the fertility of those struck. I don’t think you can get any less subtle.
These dutiful and pragmatic holidays seem to be the reverse of the celebratory and romantic ones we have today. And perhaps this is where the problem lies. We’ve condensed all the fun into selected days of the year. What we need instead is a return to more perfunctory holiday festivities. Never mind the lovey-dub and good cheer, on Christmas we’d simply burn a tree or something to ensure that the days start getting longer, and on Valentines, well, we’d give each other a slap on the back and try and make babies.
Perhaps by setting aside days in the calendar to be dutiful and pragmatic, the fun and good feelings would spread through the rest of the days of the year. I might be wrong, but as usual, I highly doubt it.
