It’s mid-February and love is in the air. Yes, Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, so stock up on your Star Wars valentines and pithy non-committal turn of phrases as we take a moment to reflect on this most sacred day.
Love — it’s what makes the world go ‘round. And so each year on February 14, out of an apparently arbitrary reverence for history, we come together to express the deep-seated cultural value that is romantic love. It is this day that we stop to remember that love with another human is the ultimate expression of fulfillment and human flourishing. In fact, this truism has been hammered into our brains since we were children, frantically moving our limbs in haphazard gesticulations without regard for the correspondence of our actions with reality. I remember like it was yesterday… it was Valentine’s Day in the year 2000, and I was posted up in the corner of the classroom as per the norm, clad in Mark McGwire apparel and endowed with an unhealthy affinity toward gel pens. You see, this Valentine’s Day was going to be different; I said to my mom, “Look Becky –– I’m just not feeling the cards and candy thing this year…. I don’t see why Valentine’s Day is important.”
“Son, you need to give out cards and candy so that you are being nice to people.” Why be nice?, I thought as a 9 year-old, sullen rebel, disillusioned with the injustices occurring on “Sesame Street” and generally distrustful given Lucy’s unceasing abuse of Charlie Brown. With her kind temperament, momma turned and said, “Because if you are not nice, then people won’t be nice back, and they won’t like you.”
And that was the day that my mom cleared everything up for me. Valentine’s Day, I realized, was about getting people to like you –– more specifically, wooing a male or female so that by virtue of that relationship, you could actualize the fullness of your potential as a sentient creature.
Duh!
In this respect, Valentine’s Day is like the Disney movie of holidays; from adolescence, we grow up enamored with the youthful exhilaration and aesthetic appeal without any critical concern for content; then, by the time we’re adults, we’ve incidentally come to hold the exact beliefs that were perennially ingrained in us. It’s funny how things just seem to work out like that.
My fear is that we’re losing our understanding of what Valentine’s Day really means. Fortunately, I was lifted from my ignorant skepticism toward our notions of romantic love at a young age. Now I find it my duty to reinforce these same ideals in our posterity lest future generations run around asserting the lunacy that our identity is not inextricably tied up in our finding love –– that would be madness. Clearly, we have no precedence of any person living a good life without finding “true love?” Oh, what’s that? Mother Teresa, you say? But surely she would have been better off had she gotten a little bit of lovin’ every once in awhile. Look, its not that those people that don’t find love have anything wrong with them per se, it’s just … let me explicate by way of analogy; it might be that not every kid receives a plethora of cards and candy. Ideally, you just want to make sure you’re not the kid alone in the corner playing with his gel pen on Valentine’s Day.
So maybe Valentine’s Day has dubious origins, and perhaps its esteem has been kindled by mass consumer manipulation, but at least it communicates the most important thing in life, which is, to quote my personal hero, Rob Bell, “Love wins.” Life is seasonal. We experience times of great joy and times of deep sadness; we fall into gain and we mourn over loss. But there is one constant –– love.
If Valentine’s Day teaches us anything, it is that if we could just find our true love, then everything will be OK. All our shallow anxieties will be lifted and our person made complete if we could just find the other half to our soul, the missing piece to our heart-shaped hole. If we just invest all of our being into another person and totally depend on them, then we are guaranteed happiness and purpose. And to those of you out there who are still feeling pain, anxiety, longing … don’t worry. There is someone out there for everyone. You are sure to find them. (Or else your life will suck).
