What? Google doesn't have an image of an old horse carrying a silly card in its teeth? A heart-shaped snowball will have to do...
Picture by Alex Raths.
Web sites are supposed to nag men everywhere about the traditional foofarah that women are supposed to need to receive from men on the fourteenth of February.
Well, if you're a man and your Significant Other is a woman, you know what she wants, right? Shop today if you have to buy something in time for tomorrow.
Brands age, if at all, by decades. "Priscilla King" is a brand. The brand was about forty in 2006, though the bogus birthdays created for it have ranged from 1961 to 1967. Do the math. Some time between this summer and next summer I'll have to start writing from the viewpoint of age sixty. After age sixty people are supposed to be too sensible and mature to bother about romance any more. Some of us are still having sex but we're supposed to consider the tender sensibilities of the young and pretend we don't, because the idea of us doing more than squeezing hands and smiling is sort of disgusting to the young, associated with the truly icky idea that their parents might have brought them into this world in the usual way. The young know they did not actually grow under cabbage leaves in the garden but it's still deeply disgusting to think about, y'know, your own parents...
If you were born in November there is actually a possibility that the microscopic blob of glup that became you was formed on Valentines Day. Salmon and heart-shaped chocolates and red wine and, a few hours later, your DNA was starting to grow in a brand new unique spiral the world had never seen before.
This post is on behalf of all of us who were not born in November.
Whatever side of my real-life sixtieth birthday I may be on, I'm close enough to it to be considered post-romantic. When sixty-somethings marry each other the proposal is supposed to be like "Might as well share the expenses, right?" or "If we were married the doctor would talk to you. I'd rather he talked to you than to my clueless twenty-something daughter. Will you marry me?"
It's not that we don't love each other--some of us do!--but that we're supposed to be practical and sensible about it, not swept off our feet by all those tiresome hormones that complicate everything for the young.
All those pink and red trinkets are supposed to appeal to hormones. Actually they appeal to memories marketers have tried to condition, to give everyone a vague feeling that the amount of pink and red clutter we receive on the fourteenth of February is a measurement of whether people liiike us.
Because the marketing starts in primary school, when liiiiking people means not bullying them, we're supposed to feel bad if we don't get lots of garbage whose only purpose in this world is to trigger conditioned emotional reactions to Valentines Day.
I'm not saying that none of it is ever cute, or fun, or funny. Well, most of it's none of those things, but the heart-patterned red mittens in the picture are cute. They're even useful. I'm not saying that nobody should ever buy pink or red things.
I am saying that some women, as well as some men, don't like the expectation that he's supposed to buy junk on one day a year, as distinct from showing affection and appreciation all through the year, every single day, and she's supposed to feel hormone-maddened by the "love" communicated by junk. If she doesn't, he didn't spend enough money! (As distinct from the possibility that her hormone cycle put her in the mood for love last week, and if he either didn't notice that, or expected the hormones to last this long, the "romance" is in trouble.)
Enough, I say.
I received enough "Valentines" junk in my day. (I wouldn't be surprised to receive some of it now--along with the Pure Life water, the deliveryman has been known to throw in a box of "Valentines" candy if one is left in the store at the end of The Day.) I said "Thank you" and "How sweet" and so on, but although some of the men who bought the junk stirred up my hormones, at the time, the junk certainly never did.
Pre-printed cards, bigger and fancier than the ones the Parents with More Money than Common Sense bought and addressed to everyone in their children's classes, including their children's official enemies? Admittedly Hallmark recognizes different levels of taste, starting with the cartoon animals saying "I like you BEARy much...BEE my Valentine" for grade two, and graduating to the multi-fold cardboard confections with lace glued on to show that HE LIKES HER SO MUCH HE SPENT FIFTEEN DOLLARS ON A CARD!--but all pre-printed cards always have reminded me of primary school. Where I could tell it was Jennifer's mother's writing on the card that said Jennifer liked me BEARy much, and in fact Jennifer's last statement on the subject had been that she hated me, and I'd never thought much of Jennifer either, Jennifer being the child of rich parents who wanted to buy friends for her but had probably told her to share her stuff with other rich people's children first, and I was supposed to feel embarrassed that my parents hadn't bought a box of those silly cards but actually I felt sort of glad. Because it was very hard even for seven-year-olds' kind of friendship to blossom in the overcrowded soil of primary schools between 1950 and 1975. Everyone else was a piece of the crowdedness. If you noticed one face in the crowd, you wished it wasn't there. Nobody in grade two wanted everyone else in the room to be their best friend. And if my Dad had the price of a box of cheap Valentine cards, I knew he'd sent it to some hungry orphans somewhere.
Conversation hearts. I did always enjoy conversation hearts. Pushing them around the table, trying to imagine the stories behind the conversations they formed. "Kiss Me." "Go Away." "Be Mine." "Dum Dum." Oh, the tragedy of unrequited love. In one box of conversation hearts, I remember I was thirteen at the time, I found one that said "Drop Dead." But does anyone over eighteen actually eat a whole box of those things? You need a box to make up entertaining conversations, but then there's all that wasted sugar doing nothing but attract ants...
Balloons. Stuffed animals. Little brass lockets. For adults? Are they serious? Actually primary school kids might decide that that stuff was too "babyish" for them!
I do like chocolates but, even if that's because they start a biochemical reaction that has chemical resemblances to "falling in love," I've never had an erotic reaction to chocolate.
Again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't buy it if you love someone whose memories have been successfully conditioned so that she (or he) feels loved at the sight of red candles and heart-shaped candy, only that there are women who don't feel that way.
There are women who prefer, if we're going to get "Valentine" junk, to get it from somebody who works at the store that had it left over at the end of the season and didn't even want to bother putting it on sale. Who would prefer that our men use the money for something more worthwhile, like the piece of hardware to fix the leak, or a donation to yet another good cause, or at least a new record by our favorite band.
"Valentines" can be a nice peace offering after a lovers' quarrel, but they are no substitute for attention and affection all through the year. Don't kid yourselves, men. If you don't listen when your wife is talking, every piece of Valentinery in the whole dang store won't make up for it.
If, on the other hand, you do listen when your wife is talking but you are still beset by thoughts that something more is expected on Valentines Day...I suggest you ask your wife about what feels most "romantic" to her, rather than consulting the sales sheets from CVS or Target.
Here, deliberately scrambled so that nobody else will know who did what, are some things my late husband, and/or my late Significant Other, and/or some young book carrier I used to consider cute, did that felt "romantic" to me. Romantic moments of my past. I think post-romantic people of grandparent age are allowed to remember those. If you thought it was disgusting that people my age can remember having once been twenty-two, you wouldn't have read this far, anyway.
1. He taught me how to do some useful "guy thing" that no male relative had, so far, got around to teaching me about. Actually several romantic moments of my youth could be described that way. I never felt that shooting, itself, was romantic. I thought that shooting and more personal attention, together, were romantic. Likewise driving a stick shift, paddling a boat, hitting a baseball, making a water-flush toilet stop running...
2. He took me hiking on a new, beautiful, scenic trail and allowed enough time to enjoy the experience.
3. I knew that, insofar as one driver's competence is enough to keep that driver safe, he could drive home in the snow. I also knew that he would have to share the road with a lot of Southerners who should not have been driving on snow and probably with some people who should not have been driving at all. So I went out and started shovelling snow out of the straighter wheel tracks that other people had formed on the snow on our two-block residential street. Neighbors, realizing that this snow was in fact expected to linger for days and the county wouldn't bother scraping it off for four or five days, started shovelling too. He drove up into what looked like a block party, laughed, then went in for another shovel and started shovelling too. We enjoyed the snow for about an hour before bedtime.
4. Feeling frazzled at work and recognizing early-stage irritability, he packed my knitting and me up for a day at the lake. We set up fishing lines. I read and knitted. He took a nap. We didn't catch anything, while someone who'd rented a boat caught a fish worth cleaning and cooking, about two hundred yards away...but it was a romantic day.
5. Romance is supposed to be primarily about "you" and "me," but one "first romantic date" experience pushed the envelope. We'd gone out to work on a job and allowed some time for personal conversation and snogging at the end of the day. Just as the snogging was getting PG-13, someone rushed up shouting that another worker on another job had been injured and it would take several men to help. He lost a few points not taking me along, but I might not have mentioned (yet) being a nursing assistant, and I loved the way he leaped into his work truck and peeled out to help the neighbor. If you're asked to help someone during a real emergency, on a date, the most romantic thing you can do is go. There may be some making up to do afterward but who doesn't love a rescuing hero?
I could probably remember ten stories if it weren't time to do something else, but I think the pattern is showing. "Romance," for some women, does not mean "money spent on commercial products." "Romance" is real life, only a little more interesting, partly because a particular person is involved.
"Romance" is the wondrous realization, when you're young and full of hormones, that you've found someone you'll still want to be with when you're old and have to make an effort to remember how those hormones use to feel. If both of you really like "Valentines," buy them by all means. If not, show her how much alike you and she are, or how well your differences can work together.
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