What
Does Love Got to do With it?
"For
this was on Saint Valentine's Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his
mate."
Geoffrey
Chaucer, 1381
The above line, translated from
Middle English, is the first recorded reference to a formal Valentine’s Day
celebrated in England sometime during the month of May. It is a line
from a poem that commemorated the one year marital engagement of two 14 year
olds, one of whom was Richard II who became King of England at age 10.
Chaucer, as you probably
recollect from high school English, is best known for “The Canterbury Tales”, a
collection of stories by a fictional group of townies who are waiting out the
Black Plague in the country. Who knew that this guy, the first to be
interred in that great graveyard of great writers, The Poet’s Corner in
Westminster Abbey, was responsible for the first Valentine?
A few centuries later,
Guttenberg invented his printing press, the official date for Valentine’s Day
was bumped up in the calendar, (obviously because the public, suffering from
Christmas withdrawal, demanded yet another red themed holiday) and possibly a
Lord Hallmark and his wife Princess Sweethearts (both of whom are most
definitely not interred in The Poet’s
Corner) saw a business opportunity.
Six hundred years later, we are
still letting other people write Valentines for us and turn our thoughts to love
for a day.
I am personally kind of
indifferent to Valentine’s Day. Maybe it's because I teach teenagers- all
those balloons, stuffed animals, carnations, and cupcakes; everyone staring at
the classroom door hoping for the delivery of a token of love.
After years of teaching, I only
have the vaguest idea of what teen spirit is supposed to smell like, but on
Valentine's Day it smells like a mix of nougat centered chocolates and
hairspray.
For me, Valentine's Day has
simply become a day that I will not be going out to eat because the restaurants
will be packed.
If there is going to be a
holiday in February, my vote goes for Federal Tax Refund Day: A Federal holiday
(i.e. NO WORK) when everyone goes out and buys expensive electronics for
themselves. But since that’s what Black Friday is all about, I guess
Valentine’s Day will be sticking around.
There is an actual group that
advocates a celebration for single people on February 15 called Single
Awareness Day (I am pretty sure they do not go by their acronym). I’m not
really sure what these singles do on the 15th, but if I were to
celebrate this holiday, I would eat half price Valentine candy while watching
the Lord of the Rings trilogy on my brand new, really big, really thin, flat
screen that I bought on Tax Refund Day.
But instead of all of these
pretend holidays, I have to face the real February 14.
A day when, as in years past, a
few close friends and family members, usually of the female persuasion, will
smile and make a point to tell me they don’t care that Chaucer’s bird failed to
cometh this year. Some of them will be lying, and I will think, “Oh,
but thou protest too much,” which loosely translated means, “Yeah,
right.”
Some girls and women will get
flowers and balloons and candy, be taken out to Red Lobster or Printworks, and
be told how loved they are, but other girls and women will not, and some will
be hurt by this.
I know this not because I am especially
intuitive, but because they have told me, in emails and phone calls and
whispered conversations dating back to the early 80s.
Since the early 80s I have lent
support to these girls and women with the shallow clichés that are so easy to
resort to when responding to people in pain, “It’ll all be over by tomorrow,”
and more recently, “Have you GOOGLEd Single Awareness Day”?
But my words, of course, offer
no solace. I know this, not because I am intuitive, and not because
I have to be told that my words are hollow. I know this because I am
alive, and in the collection of cells that make up me, a me, I know, is a mere
flicker in the cosmos, I have known great hurt and great love. And
Valentine’s Day or not, we don’t need to be reminded that love is better.
Scientists and therapists tell
us that our cognitive powers might make us homo-sapiens, but it is our capacity
to love which makes us human.
You’ll get no argument from me
that romantic love is overrated, because, well, it isn’t. Passionate
romantic love is wonderful, but it is usually fleeting and unexpected, which
adds to all the fun. But love, those four little letters, a
perfectly aligned two consonants, two vowels is so much more. Our capacity
to love is dependent upon our ability to incorporate empathy, compassion, and
respect to those around us, without a holiday reminding us to do
so.
Contemporary poet and Triad
resident Maya Angelou succinctly and eloquently sums up the necessity for love
in the following lines:
“And
suddenly we see
that
love costs all we are
and
will ever be.
But it
is only love
which
will set us free.”
Maybe this year I will pay a
bit more attention to Valentine’s Day. Maybe I’ll call up an old
friend and thank her for being there for me through a difficult time, send my
sister a card, bring in a bag of Sweethearts for my students. Who
knows how reckless I’ll get. But I still draw the line at going out to dinner.
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