The Wicked Truth About Love

Valentine’s Day – Bah, Humbug!

I don’t feel like writing something about love, but it’s the thing to do in February. Valentine’s Day comes around and commentators have to come up with something profound to say, lovers have to deliver on some showy demonstration of their love, and married couples have to pretend the romance is still alive whether they feel like it or not. I am not usually against cyclical celebrations. In fact, I love participating in ritual events. I attend worship regularly, I celebrate Easter and Christmas and birthdays. I know that to participate in a ritual is to allow yourself to be formed by it and maybe that’s behind my resentment of Valentine’s Day this year. I do not want to be formed in the image of love as something you fall into like a giant Chicago pothole. Or that I love my husband of 31 years because I was struck by the arrow of a capricious cherub. And to have to demonstrate my love on schedule and in the manner decided for me by card, candy and flower companies is making my blood boil.

Because I am a student of mimetic theory, I know that it is futile to think that I don’t need any help at all figuring out how and when to express my love. These kinds of things are learned and so are culturally determined. We all learn them unconsciously as we are growing up. We absorb our culture’s idea of what love is, who is the type of person we should fall in love with, and how that love should be expressed. But I am feeling a bit like a two year old who insists that “you are not the boss of me” when I think of who exactly is dictating all those things to me. Because we live in a culture of materialism and consumerism, we learn quite early and quite definitively that love is best expressed with a “romantic” object or experience that we purchase from some vendor that professes sincere interest in the health of our relationship. To my chagrin, mimetic theory also teaches me that my mood of resentment of all things Valentine this year can lead me to do things that are reactionary and therefore as dependent on those vendors as if I had become their best customer.

To free myself from my very un-Cupid-like feelings toward the Valentine’s Day industry, I need to do two things. First I need to step back from my resentment and incipient hatred of the purveyors who I think are trying to tell me what to do. They are not evil and the only power they have over me is the power I give them, so there is no use in hating them. Second, I need to become more secure in the other culture of love that has shaped me. The culture of my family, of my faith, and of the partnership I have with my husband. This culture of love is not trying to sell me anything. It teaches me that love is not about showy displays but about a willingness to be changed in relationship with the one you love. Sometimes I can be a bit afraid of that, of letting go of what I think I know about myself, of the ways I know I am good or right. So afraid, in fact, that I distract myself with some self-righteous resentment directed toward an easy target, like Valentine’s Day. As I write this I am beginning to feel a bit less tight-fisted and angry and a tiny bit more relaxed. Maybe an annual requirement to express my love can be a good thing. Perhaps this year I can be truly present to my husband and find the grace to admit just how much I need and treasure him. So, with that, and even though I’m not sure I’m quite ready to say it or believe it, Happy Valentine’s Day. There, that wasn’t so bad after all!