Be My Valentine

Good evening ladies and gentleman

With the red roses, over sized bottles of champagne and bouquets of flowers splashed in rainbows of color now nothing more than a memory for another year, I find myself trying to understand the point of it all. What is the meaning of valentine’s day? This random day in February, its as if everyone shot up on the “love” drug when they woke up Tuesday morning, beyond the usual worries, thoughts and fears they normally harbor, for the reality of valentine’s day, like on this day the usually crystal clear lens loses focus and nothing seems as it “should.”

I don’t like valentine’s day, it tends to create a rage in me for the world being as it is supposed to be, where something that should be uniquely yours, a connection with someone so powerful and emotionally profound is  taken and boiled down to its component parts. 12 red roses, a box of chocolates, not too cheap (but can’t be spending too much) and an over sized teddy bear that after 2 or 3 days becomes the latest addition to the friends of the family dog.

Its depressing because it feels so pointless, so forced. “Oh its February 14th! I should go buy loads of stuff because everything in the shops is draped in red velvet and you never know, spend a 20 there and who knows what might come of it,” like the most meaningful connection you share with someone in a world that especially yesterday seems so thrown into chaos, is nothing more than a trade off. What the fuck world. You had something so beautiful and just destroyed it. Beat it mercilessly into some form of submission, so it can be dealt with and predicted.

Love, connections and relationships are partnerships, not something we should be jostling for the advantage in while finding another random way of getting gifts that wouldn’t make any sense any other time of the year. Will there ever be a teddy bear that is too big? Bouquets of flowers too dramatic? Its like trying to measure how much you “like” someone. Stupid, because whether you like it or not, its impossible to measure, because to me, nobody really understands what “liking” or “loving” someone means, so how can any number of presents, or the size of the presents ever really define it? Its like trying to measure the distance between the earth and moon using the ruler you carried in your pencil case at school.

I wander, of the strange behaviors existing throughout a smorgasbord of complex thoughts, feelings and ideas, if we fear being in love, or fear being loved, (if for the sake of argument we use Valentines’ idea to its fullest extent.) I think there is life, and the amalgamation of emotions and feelings that come with it. Happiness, joy, envy, sadness, jealousy, pain. We have all experienced all of these emotions in some capacity, some having more of an effect than others. I have always viewed love as something extra, something more. Maybe the way i view love is odd, as this idealistic, magnificently esoteric thing for those you wish to share this “ultimate closeness” with. Maybe we can live with a great deal of emotional thoughts, feelings and responses, but the vulnerability that comes with love, the horrifying sense that someone has so much power over you, to build you up to such great heights or down to the darkest depths of hopelessness that if you were to fall down there you may never emerge.

More importantly perhaps is that we may not even want to emerge again.

Maybe that’s the point of valentine’s day, to take away from the fear of vulnerability, to give us a fake, forced sort of belief that “oh everybody is probably doing this sort of thing today.” You imagine that conversation with that person, the one in your mind you seem so connected to. The words don’t come, the point can’t be made, and the huge amounts of everything that have been building up inside you remain unexplained as the merciless cycle continues far beyond February 14th and all that valentines has achieved is to show you how low you have fallen.

Why in society have we built so much pressure into February 14th? Valentine’s day is made out to be a huge deal for those doing the whole “love” thing, like somehow its going to mean more buying someone flowers and going out to dinner on this day so much so than a day, week or month later. Like it might somehow make a difference. Surely isn’t it going to be much more of an effective display to do this randomly? Not to build up to some form of day, to go out to dinner randomly, buy flowers because you want to, not because its necessary. If you want to share that connection with someone on such a level that is so powerfully brilliant why not create that unique situation, that feeling that cannot be explained, that isn’t part of the world, that is truly yours. Take the fundamentals of “you” and that connection you share with someone away from the ideologies of society, what is considered “normal” and this supposed “utopia.” As to you, all of that will be foreshadowed in the moonlight piercing through the darkness of reality. This is not “utopia.” This is your…well your valentine i suppose. This is the true meaning, to me, of valentine.

With this comes the hardest thing to deal with in a world where vulnerability is a weakness, for when you open your heart to someone, or even to the idea of sharing a connection with them another human being, you can’t close it again. Once you tell someone how you feel, they don’t tend to forget. There will be a seismic shift in your relationship with this person, for you may grow closer, or maybe move further away. On either level, that beautiful connection you had with them is changed somehow, and i think to anyone this is a scary thing.

Its as if feel like we shouldn’t be allowed to get to that level, for maybe we do not “deserve” it? I have used this excuse many times before- because when all is said and done. That’s what it is- an excuse. An excuse not to look within yourself, to not understand that sometimes its good to be vulnerable, for we have to feel pain sometimes if we are ever to understand the joys of life and love. Above all of the crap in the entire world, allow yourself, to understand yourself. You will never be able to see the patterns of the Davinci Code if you don’t know what sort of tools you are working with.

This way,  when we form some profound positive connection with another person, something we may have been maintaining just below the surface, just low enough for it not to be seen, we feel it on such a higher level, giving you so much more power to drive through whatever fear of vulnerability may come at you, for you believe that it will come good and life as you know it will develop, not towards “utopia” but something more.  Even if it doesn’t turn out the way you hoped, you have something to take away from the experience. A lesson of life, of love. I think if we choose to be in these lessons, they could easily change your world, our world as we know it.

Chocolates and roses seem rather meaningless in comparison to that.

Yours, with love as always.

DR

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