Valentine’s Day invites us to paint a caricature of love. Valentine’s Day is to love as false eyelashes and high heels are to womanhood: one heightened manifestation of the thing, but by no means the thing in its fullness or normalcy.
The thing is, I would like every day to feel like Valentine’s Day, just as I would like to be the type of person who can wear false lashes and towering heels every day. In reality, I am complex and fallible, and so is love, so it isn’t possible to be “on” every minute of every day. If candlelit dinners and moonlit confessions were your daily life, they would lose all semblance of specialness. But Valentine’s Day calls on us to step into the fantasy that love could be like this all the time, that we could be like this all the time. It’s a fantasy I am very much open to – drawn to, even.
I just want the whole affair to be less pressured. The people who complain loudly about Valentine’s Day are usually decrying the burden of expectations: to spend money, to plan a perfect evening, to broadcast the perfection of your imperfect love on social media for all to see. I would love for the day’s mission to be the celebration of love, however that manifests for you.
Years when I’ve been single, I’ve often devised elaborate solo dates for myself, to bring a sense of specialness to a night that might otherwise be depressing. I’ve taken myself to musicals and plays and comedy shows. I’ve holed up in café windows with my laptop, drafting wildly romantic fanfiction stories about my favorite characters. I’ve filled a tote bag with beloved books and schlepped them to libraries or bookstores with big cushy armchairs for an afternoon of basking in other people’s ideas. I’ve gotten on trains or buses or streetcars, absurdly overdressed, for day-long sightseeing journeys while listening to podcasts. These are all, I think, courageous acts of self-love, because (cheesy as it is to say so) choosing and pursuing self-love is, itself, courageous.