Valentine’s Day: A Retraction

In the days of my girlish innocence, when clouds were made of lace and sunsets tasted like orange crème, I picked up the Torch of the Eternal Flame. That’s right—with the ardor of a freshman lover, I professed my love for Valentine’s Day. Now, with the inalienable caprice of young love, I’m going to retract my statement.

Or at least, amend it. I can rack up a list of things I hate about Valentine’s day—trashy pop music, cheap milk chocolate, lingerie advertisements, crowded transportation, the whole world decorated like a 50’s chick whose bubble gum blew up in her face—but PDA tops the list, and no, I’m not talking about Patent Ductus Arteriosus, the medical term for a broken heart.

If you’re going to complain about the commercialization of love, about the kaleidoscopes of pink chocolates and stuffed bears that invade the airwaves every February, then for the love of Hershey’s chocolate, please don’t advertise your relationship on every social media platform and street corner between here and Kingdom Come.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with celebrating romance or plain human decency, and hell, I’m never going to complain about free candy, but Valentine’s Day is less about love than about public declarations of love or physical attraction.

Even as a kid, you’d distribute three kinds of valentines, their forms invariable, their messages unmistakable:

1. The cut-out cartoon blocks whose dorky puns didn’t make Scooby Doo or Jimmy Newtron any less tacky. These were usually accompanied by Sweethearts or banana Laffy Taffy, and were given to you as reluctantly as you received them because your sworn enemy, although the most nefarious humanoid in the galaxy by age 10, still answered to their parents, and this contrived peace-offering belonged to a system of elementary school politics that went over both of your heads.
2. The homemade doilies and pink cardstock that put your crafting skills to the test. As you got older, tissue paper roses featured prominently. You’d splurge on mid-range candy, like nougat and lollipops, or, if you were a cool fifth grader, soda-flavored chapstick. These valentines were for your friends, the messages had enough inside jokes to form their own cipher, and looking back, you almost wish you had saved them.
3. Doily Chernobyl. Glitter supernova. Enough stickers and glue to perform reconstructive surgery. You tried to play it cool, but the cards for your friends were all a warm-up for this life-altering creation, which took four attempts to perfect. It was meant for someone absolutely secret, written in prose that would make Jane Austen smirk, and you carried it to school as if it were a baby turtle dove. Like a true artist, you didn’t sign this masterpiece, but let the power of love—and the secondary skin of stamps and sparkles on your fingers—speak for itself. Bonus points if you threw in a box of Ferrero-Roche or nearly took off a finger with patterned-blade scissors.

If the teachers mistook the ol’ 2/14 for peacemaking and team-building, let the record stand that Valentine’s Day was just an opportunity to deliver a statement of hatred, affection or infatuation so literally-candy-coated that no grown up could tell the difference. But we knew. We all knew. And that’s just my point. Valentine’s Day is not merely about expressing your feelings to your S.O., it’s about publicly declaring them.

If anything, college has taken it up a few levels. We use our lips not to seal envelopes but to envelope a partner’s face in broad daylight on Sproul Plaza. You might as well pass out flyers about your incredible sex life.

Wasn’t changing your relationship status on Facebook enough? Can’t the lonely suckers of the world get their third (okay, fourth) coffee without a real-time reminder of their misery? I’d rather deal with Potato Dextrose Agar than walk past PDA, especially on Valentine’s Day.

Here’s my objection—my subjective objection, as it were—to the PDA: it feels, at least in my experience, possessive. But I didn’t figure out why until the outset of winter break, as I shuttled home on Amtrak, and the 12-hour journey afforded ample time to acquaint myself with the other passengers. Picture a couple who match in Doc Martens, faux leather and 1980’s band tees.

They’re sitting across from me in the station, kissing like the spaghetti in Lady and the Tramp was replaced with an extremely juicy plum. I’m tired, it’s post-finals, and I haven’t been out in two weeks; I move seats.

Around 5 pm, I head to the viewing car to watch the sun set on the golden frontier. The couple arrives a few minutes later and grabs the bench next to me to continue this morning’s wordless conversation.

I’m staring out the opposite window with Spotify on full blast when his voice butts into my reverie.

“Did you just bite me?” he says, hardly in a whisper. I’m amazed that he’d say it so loud.

She laughs, and he says it again. “Did you just bite me?” I want to turn around and sweetly ask if he can “shut the fuck up,” but then I understand. He wants everyone to hear it.

She whispers something inaudible, he booms, “I liked it” and the kissing resumes.

I turn away, feeling somehow complicit in his rudeness, and the cogs in my head are turning.

I’ve dated men who were passably affectionate in cars and movie theaters and couches, and it was a sweet, hair-tickling, soft-smiling affection that I never minded. But when we were sitting together in public spaces, they’d touch my knees, hold my hand until the sweat had almost washed away my fingerprints, and kiss me at grotesquely pointless moments (on rapid transit, for example).

After the Great Locomotive Liplock of 2015, I pinpointed the source of my irritation: that undertone of subtle bragging.

A kiss that in private had me spewing comparisons “to a summer’s day” burns like a brand when delivered in public. I don’t know if it’s meant like this, but I feel like I have been claimed, marked like territory. “This girl is mine.” And maybe it’s not about me at all. Maybe it’s the guy-for me, it’s a guy-and this agonizingly public kiss is a statement of their own sexual potency, like “look at me, I’ve found someone.”

I may be a cynic, but I do believe in love, and I believe that bragging has no part in it. At the end of day, it’s simple: no one cares.

You are not a character in a movie that the world is watching. No one is cheering on your relationship. Even if your families were engaged in a turf war for apartment parking spaces and you declared your star-crossed (literally star-crossed, your zodiac signs are incompatible) love in fully-orchestrated musical numbers, even if you were torn apart by fate and your lover’s sister’s boyfriend’s mother blended the letters you sent your SO into kale smoothies, even if said lover was eventually hospitalized with a grave case of acne and only a kiss from your pet aardvark could save them—no one cares. There’s no reason to show off.

You’re just begging the misanthropes of the world to throw Sweethearts at you (the nasty white and orange ones). And seriously, if you’re before me in line at Philz, stop touching each other and just freakin’ order.

So concludes my Valentine’s retraction. Undoubtedly, a few readers will psychoanalyze this piece and diagnose me with latent cat-woman tendencies and a predisposition for crochet, to which I can only shrug; cats, at least, aren’t known for their gushing displays of affection.