Do you hate Valentine’s Day? Does a wad of turds instantly fall out of your mouth every time you see a happy couple? Wish you could set fire to the aisle dedicated to it with your eyes? Can’t believe that loathing the holiday has now somehow found a way to be equally as commercialized? Stop this. No one is impressed.
Do you love Valentine’s Day? Get a little high from throwing a fit about not getting flowers from your significant other? Make your Olive Garden reservation before you even have a date? Convince some sad human that 50 Shades of Grey is good date movie? These are all the worst ideas you have ever had.
Here is my idea: Instead of letting Feb. 14th make you foam at the mouth for whatever reason gets your goose, choose instead to celebrate love. Not the kind of love that is expressed with a diamond that was handcrafted in a vat of chocolate or what ever the hell Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman is hawking in that commercial, but the kind of love that you actually feel, that affirms your believe in humankind.
Every day people confuse love with sex, power, fear, pain, control, escape and, dear gravy-smothered Jesus, food. So why not use Valentine’s Day to recognize plain, old, regular love, the kind that doesn’t convince you to wait two hours to respond to a text just to maintain dominance in a relationship? I don’t claim to know everything about love. I don’t think I even know half of the things you need to learn about love in a lifetime. But I am still going to hold onto the belief that it’s the shit.
So why not take a day and celebrate it? Tell the people you love that you love them. Give them things you made with your own two hands, even if that thing is a glass you filled with ice and bourbon. (Fuck, if someone besides me or a bartender fills up my glass with ice and bourbon, I will consider this the best Valentine’s Day ever.) Blow kisses to everyone who stops at the same traffic light as you. Look in the mirror and sing Whitney Houston songs to yourself, because you love other people better when you love yourself.
I think love is still magical in that way that I still think watching movies in the theater is magical: They both ask you to be quiet for a while and see if you can find some of yourself in someone else’s story. And if you find yourself in a movie theater showing 50 Shades of Grey this weekend, watch this interview of the two lead actors and appreciate the fact that you didn’t have to have fake BDSM sex with someone you hate then have to be interviewed about it for months.
Then go home and have real sex with someone who you are at least 60 percent sure you like, even if that someone is yourself.
