By SETH BARNES barnes-
VALENTINE’S DAY HAS PASSED. AS YOU tuck your chocolates and cards away, tend to your fresh roses and try to pronounce the name of the ridiculously expensive French restaurant you treated your sweetheart to, consider this: Feb. 15 is, in fact, the biggest day in the annals of romance. It’s when everyone can start complaining about how drab and disastrous their love life is again.
As I’ve said before, there’s nothing America loves more than a preposterous, self-indulgent whining fit. As a day of faux romantic bliss, Feb. 14 sets the table very nicely for the following day, when we can all go back to being crabby, immature spoilsports. We behave well on Valentine’s Day, pulling out all the stops to show our tender affection for that special someone. And we don’t feel so bad 24 hours later when we’d happily elbow Cupid out of the way if we passed him on the street.
I don’t need to go into the commercial manufacturing behind Valentine’s Day. It’s pretty much accepted that the holiday is a plastic, insincere charade promoted by the federal government as a subsidy to the greeting card industry. But that doesn’t change the fact that everyone falls into two classes: 1) those who have to do something, anything for a loved one by virtue of the unspoken Valentine’s Obligation Rule (if you don’t demonstrate the extent of your love on this one random day in February, you’re an unfeeling, possibly abusive ogre) or 2) those who wish they were included in group 1).
As such, nobody can escape Valentine’s Day. Everyone has a stake in it, and as a result, is tacitly allowed to flip the tables on their behavior the very next day. Even the too-cool-for-school couples who shrug off the festivities as another example of American corporate imperialism run amok are, in their own way, celebrating the fact that their love is so deep-rooted and true that it doesn’t need to be outwardly expressed.
As you walk around the office or run errands today, take a look at everyone around you. You’ll notice a healthy, slightly weary glow. It’s as if everyone just completed a marathon and doesn’t have to return to training and eating well for months. We all ran the stupid Valentine’s race and can get back to our core competencies of eating French fries and lounging on the couch. The romantic equivalent of this is setting your relationship on cruise control, or (if you’re single) jabbering on and on about how miserable your pursuit of the opposite, or same, sex is.
And let me emphasize that the slightly jaded normalcy that rears its head every Feb. 15 isn’t bad, not by any means. Because you can’t live your life at the extreme of lovey-dovey bliss without risking burnout. Ask that hot and heavy couple in high school or college you know that spent every waking minute together before breaking up via nuclear meltdown. Over the long run, slow and steady wins the race.
In many ways, in this era of reality TV and skyrocketing divorce rates, the idealistic sheen of Valentine’s Day has been scrubbed off. The Internet is riddled with people perpetually looking... and many times, it’s just a fling they fancy. After all, these days, you can’t be too rigid about a timetable for finding your life partner. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Life goes on and a little cynicism and old fashioned complaining can be just the right medicine to keep on keeping on. And that’s why when reality kicks in on Feb. 15, known hereafter as St. WhineTine’s Day, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 15, 2007. Read the original PDF.