Valentine's in Blue Jeans

Of all the clichés I've ever heard about love, one is particularly strong in my mind... especially since I don't believe in it. I've been told, and I'm sure everyone has been told this at least once, that the "perfect one", the "special one", the "soul mate", or "true love" or whatever other name is used for the romantic partner, is the one person who will love me "as I really am". And I was naive enough to believe it for a long period of time, until personal experience and some wisdom accumulated over the years proved me wrong. Big time!
Now, what does that have to do with Valentine's Day?.. Well, just about EVERYTHING.
Two weeks before this Irish holiday that most people consider to be American, LOVE becomes the central subject of all discussions, chats, articles, blogs, web sites, mass e-mails, commercials, special discounts, and so on and so forth. And that would be only natural if it wasn't all so freaking false !
VALENTINE'S DAY, the way we fake it and make it (or make it and fake it, it's pretty much the same thing), it's actually AGAINST love. It's against making you happy with who you are and who you are in love with. It's against the delicate delights of the spiritual and emotional world and life. Because it's got nothing to do with anything spiritual and emotional. In fact, OUR Valentine's day is as MATERIAL as it gets.
Now would be a good moment to start raging against the all-powerful corporations who have made Valentine's Day rather commercial than spiritual. But that would be wrong. That would mean accusing THEM of something that WE have created, when in fact, all THEY are doing is to take advantage of OUR mistakes. After all, the corporations might have made a good trade out of Valentine's Day, but it was US who gave them the MATERIAL and MEANS to do it.
Did you ever notice the pattern in which an absent parent tries to compensate his absence by buying expensive presents to the kids?... Of course you did, it's a reality as old as world itself. The consumptive world, that is. And it's no secret to anyone that the longer is the absence, the more expensive is the present...
Applying this pattern to love relationships, with a case study on the gift-exchange entailed by such a holiday as Valentine's Day, it becomes clear that, once more, people take the easy way out in their confrontations to other human beings. Because, make no mistake, being in a love relationship is as much of a battle and confrontation as any other social relationship... or even more. Because being in love, and surviving the process in which these emotions grow up to become love, surviving this maturation, then, implies such a huge consumption of emotional resources, we often wake up feeling void and lifeless once the process is completed... Yes, you guessed it right, it's when you say to your partner: I no longer have feelings for you!...
You're wrong, and you're halfway to admitting it, but still....
The truth of the matter is that we, human beings, are awfully slow learners. Just because what we once felt has transformed into something new, which we no longer recognize, it doesn't mean that the new feeling is a less intense or enriching one. It's simply something new, something that needs exploring and nurturing, something that will, over and over again, exhaust most of our emotional resources. But again, man is such a wonderful resource to mine....
Getting back to Valentine's day. Most people who decide not to break up with their partner at the moment of their falling out of love (the one I mentioned before as "no longer having feelings") will find a comforting and comfortable middle way of staying in the relationship without using too much of the resources. And when the time comes to celebrate the feeling that connects them to the special other, their easiest way out is to compensate for everything they haven't felt at the right time, for everything they didn't say or do, for all the smiles, kind words, soft touches and kisses, for all the hugs, the tears, the laughters and the fears they didn't share with each other.. they just compensate it all with a present. And whether it's a bunch of flowers, a box of chocolate candies, a sexy piece of lingerie or anything else, it's still something material that has little or nothing at all to do with the real thing. The feelings we forgot to feel....
And if anything else was needed to make the disaster complete, the involution from spiritual to material creatures, the fall from angels to less-than-humans, if anything, I say, could make things worse, that is the one thing we all bow to: THE MEDIA. All of the newspapers and web sites and TV shows and everything else creates such a HUGE social pressure around the idea of Valentine's Day, that not only do people feel obliged to celebrate it, but they also have to do it THE RIGHT WAY. And the only right way to do it is as the media teaches us to...
Is it any wonder then, that I feel like crap on this lovely 14th of February, just because I'm wearing jeans and snickers on a day when I'M SUPPOSED to be dressed in my most incredibly sexy outfit that I've got, spend hours arranging my hair and putting on make-up, cancel all my appointments and professional meetings so that I can go chasing for a present for my baby.... ??
No, it's not. Because the pressure of the society, or of the media if you like, is telling me that I deserve to feel so if I refuse to bend to their rules. And that sucks! Whatever happened to personal freedom ?...
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