Tomorrow marks the fourth Valentine's Day since I came out of the closet. (I choose notation only because I refuse to count Valentine's Days before I fully actualized my sexual orientation) Tomorrow will also mark the 20th Valentine's Day I've had in my lifetime. And alas, I have never known what it means to have a Valentine on this day.
So what does it even mean to have a "Valentine"? What do I think of when I hear the word "Valentine"? Is anyone else envisioning a greasy, come-hither-lipped Italian man atop a Vespa in a leather jacket carrying a dozen red roses? I suppose the point here is that it's different for everyone everywhere, and it's different from what our parents and their forefathers perceived it to be.
Anyone with a sociological imagination is now giddy in their seat: "I know! I know! I have something to contribute to better articulate your thoughts! Call on me!" Simmer down, young Durkheim, simmer down. Valentine's Day is merely another social construction of reality: one of those inorganic things humanity construes to commemorate some conflated notion of love.
Now I've done some research (read: did a Wikipedia search) and what I discovered was astonishing. This whole Valentine thing has been around since the middle ages and Chaucer, when English was still "Middle" English. Additionally, over the past hundred years or so, Valentine's Day became increasingly commercialized, hand-written letters giving way to mass-manufactured greeting cards.
In other words, this holiday has taken the most sacred thing our humanity has the capacity for, love, and mass-manufactured it into preconceived notions that somehow describe the inextricable way we express our want to be in the presence of another. A box of chocolates or bank account permitting, some bling, suffice when it comes to communicating our feelings.
Valentine's Day: socially-constructed, mass-manufactured, materialistic, and sickey-sweet. So here's the kicker: I'm pissed off that I'm not a part of it. I can't help but feel like I'd kill to go out for dinner and eat chocolate and get presents and have amazing sex on Valentine's Day. What's a heartachy single gay man to do on a holiday that celebrates couples and young lovebirds?
Well folks, the answer may not be so simple. I could take the easy way out, buy myself a bottle of Fat Bastard Chardonnay, and tell everyone my Valentine happens to be of the genus vinus and comes from the Rhone River in France. But putting my heartache into hyperdrive with intoxication isn't so appealing.
I could put a bandaid on the problem and go out to party and find someone just as desperate and damaged as myself and make out. I could also pretend Valentine's Day doesn't exist, or better yet curse Valentine's Day as if it somehow would feel guilty for everything its done to me. But at the end of the day, I'm always looking for the self-actualized thing to do, and none of these seem to fit into that category.
Well if Valentine's Day is about who you love and how you express it, why shouldn't I spend it with people I love? My friends have been here for me all along and I've just put myself in this romantic deadlock. Why not show some appreciation for the people who will carry me through my bitchy heartache?
So put down the personal ads, single people. Let's get together and bring back some love to Valentine's Day. Call up your single friends, and whip out the cheese and crackers: it will be a long night, but at least it won't be lonely. Love is all around us, so stop looking for it. Stick to the love you don't have to find, the love you don't have to fight for.
