“You are your best thing.” -Toni Morrison Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, so there was much abuzz about love, fate and destiny—from engagements to attempts at reconciliation, it is a day usually marked for exaggerated gestures and whimsy. For people who are in love or who have had long-time or long-distanced relationships, the day yields sweet memories if not the promise of a weekday sexcapade. Valentine’s Day for new and renewed love is an opportunity to publicly showcase relationships and gestures by sharing pictures and timelines of glitter-filled Hallmark cards, blood red roses, heart-shaped chocolate candies, white table-clothed meals, and decadent black lingerie and other romantic reminiscences. For people who are not in love, or who find themselves in loveless or unhealthy relationships, Valentine’s Day can be triggering for the ways it amplifies the pseudo-possibility of happily-ever-afters they have not themselves experienced or sustained. For those who are cynical about manufactured holidays, Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to quip about the capitalistic and materialistic focus of unrealistic conceptions of love relationships. For people who value their relationships, particularly femme to femme friendships, Valentine’s Day is morphed into Galentine’s Day, and is an opportunity to celebrate fateful friendships with other “gals” and people with whom you are in platonic love. And then, there are those of us who, like me, are mostly ambivalent. February 14 is, well, February 14.
That is an amazing statement. I love your writings. They always hit home for me.
Apt! Thank you for sharing, Dr. B.