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Regardless of your romantic relationship status, Valentine’s Day (today) — like every other day of your life — is what you make it.
If you have a partner and decide to mark the day with generous gifts and acts of affection, great. But you could, of course, do that any day.
If you have no “special someone” and you opt to mope or grumble or make sarcastic quips, you can do that any day as well (though if you actually do those things everyday, you may have a clue as to why you have no special someone).
If you attended an anti-Valentine event like the one at the Osterhout Library Wednesday night, kudos to exercising freedom of choice.
If you just never found the right person, or never felt a need to look and are fine the way you are, that works too.
If you feel like Valentine’s Day should not be exclusive to a life-partner, you are free to share the love in a broader sense. Flowers to mom or dad, a communal box of chocolates for the office, cupcakes for your child’s classmates at school. The options are many. Purists will claim that cheapens the objective of singling out a singular relationship, but there are no rules mandating celebration one way or another.
Many area residents surely have memories of grade-school Valentine celebrations that included decorating a shoe box with a slit in the lid and putting it on the desk as repository for classmate cards. Clearly the tradition survives, with most stores selling valentines not by the card, but by the box, often in themes. Some even include the box.
The ritual had potential downsides. At any age, it could hurt if someone else got more cards than you, or if you had dropped a special card into the box of the object of affection that went unremarked.
There is a curious observation to consider: We annually hear of the “War on Christmas,” yet rarely hear of efforts to remove “St. Valentine from Valentine’s Day.” Considering the widespread story of his brutal martyrdom in most versions of the saint’s saga, a little distance from the historical figure might not be a bad thing.
Or maybe it is. After all, the common story — that he refused to renounce his faith, healed a jailer’s blind daughter and left her a note signed “Your Valentine” prior to execution — expresses a type of love that transcends pretty much all the other stuff most people talk about when Valentine’s Day comes up, regardless of whether you see it as a chance to let someone know how important they are or deem it another crass grasp at hard-earned money by amoral capitalists profiteering from our consumer culture.
Regardless of what you do, today gives a chance to contemplate the value and meaning of “love,” an emotion that, untainted by other feelings or ambitions, is always a positive. Consider the words of 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails.”
Regardless of what you make of today, the world could use more of that.