why I hate Valentine's Day

I hate Valentine's Day because I have this scary image of myself in the distant future: I'm married, maybe we have kids, and we live our lives, go to our jobs, and it's just so bland. And lifeless. And dull. And the kind of love that right now is the ultimate meaning to life is just not there. When Valentine's Day comes around, I buy my wife flowers, or we go to dinner, or we rent a movie, or we have sex for the first time in months, and somehow that makes up for all the other lifeless days we've been living without love. And that's the scariest thing I can think of. That love will have lost its place as an everyday feeling, something to overcome and bewilder even the most boring of moments. So, Valentine's Day has the potential to be the scariest day of my life because I could realize that I've given up, that I've succumbed to a new and terrible kind of normal. That my life doesn't mean what it used to - what it does now, that I refuse to let fade into the despair of faithlessness.

This year, I have discovered new defenses. I have new explanations for why celebrating this non-holiday might make a little bit of sense, in a sarcastic, ironic sort of way, as well as new reasons for dismissing it for folly. What I am sure of, today, is something that, above almost everything else, I hope to maintain for the rest of my life: that Valentine's Day is nothing special. That it should never be an excuse or an opportunity, just another date on the calendar.

This year, I am doing nothing that I would not do on just about any other Monday of the year: I am going to the WAB for dinner. I am going there, for the first time, with a girl that I have seen thirteen times before. She told me, last time I saw her, that we have chemistry, and I agree with her. If our attraction to each other and compatible weirdness are "science" then Valentine's Day is something more like a "religious" holiday, celebrated with a mindless trip to church, not in appreciation of the architecture or for camaraderie with fellow believers but because of a blind faith in empty words, that I just cannot partake in.