You think I’m pretty
Without any make-up on
You think I’m funny
When I tell the punch line wrong
I know you get me
So I’ll let my walls come down, down

Before you met me
I was a wreck
But things were kinda heavy
You brought me to life
Now every February
You’ll be my valentine, valentine

I don’t know where the Glee plot line will take Kurt and Blaine, but this moment from the clip resonates with real life experiences. I think sometimes we can feel so alone and isolated that we run the risk of seeing things in others that aren’t there. Maybe we are unsure if we can ever measure up to the standards of lovability that blast in our face and knock us down. Who can be like Katy Perry or Russell Brandt? We fail before we get out of the starting gate. Or maybe, like Kurt, we are being physically and emotionally picked on, abused, literally beaten down daily. How can we be blamed for projecting our dream for love all over the place, on any target until it sticks? We all want to find that special someone who will see us for who we are, no make-up, no pretense, no walls.

The song declares, “This is real/ So take a chance/ And don’t ever look back,” but I’m not sure if it’s real at this point for Kurt and Blaine. They just met. We know Kurt’s head is filled with dreams, his heart in need of tender loving care. For it to have a chance at real, Kurt needs to know what’s in Blaine’s head and what his heart might need. He doesn’t yet, hasn’t even thought to ask. Until he does, it’s still a dream. We are all pulling for Kurt. Dreams can come true, though they rarely do on schedule. But Feb. 14 comes around every year, so ready or not, Happy Valentine’s Day. May all our dreams come true.

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!

The Super Hero couple is the one that seems to thrive on combat because they have equated proximity to disaster with love. For some couples, this is the path they choose – maybe they think the make-up sex is worth the combative road it takes to get there. But if you tend to fall into this type of relationship and are looking for a way out, a good first step is to recognize that you and you’re partner are dependent on risk, conflict and volatility. The next time you feel the need to rekindle your desire for one another and a fight is looming, try a simple exercise: instead of arguing, try saying those tender things you usually say to each after the fight, BEFORE the fight gets underway. Then return to the thing you were going to fight about believing in the love you have for each other and you will be amazed at how quickly you resolve the problem. And guess what? It’s very possible that you will feel your love renewed, and the flame of desire will be rekindled without all that messy conflict. Give it a try and let me know what happens.

I thought for a moment, and then stood up and walked out of the room without saying a word. I went down the hall to my room, my heart thumping, wondering if my gambit would pay off. Sure enough, they soon left and before the day was over one of them had called me for a date. I dated him for a few months and then dated the other one for a few months. Success of a kind, I suppose. But why did it work? Why did they both want to date the one girl who, as far as they could see, was so disinterested and unentertained by them that she could walk away without looking back? Because what they thought they saw in me was the one thing that human desire finds most desirable — a being so satisfied with itself that it desires nothing or no one. Because I could present the illusion of satisfied desire, I became desirable. We all know it works — at least women have known it forever and often use it to snare unsuspecting males. But what it reveals is a little understood truth about desire — the thing that we all most ardently desire is not a person or an object at all, but a state of being that one might call fulfilled. Fulfilled being, a very mystical thing I suppose, but very real nonetheless. Desire desires being. So when you find yourself drawn to someone or some object that grips you so passionately that you think you must possess it or die, you might be onto something true or you might be chasing an illusion like those freshman football players. The task of our lives is to learn to tell the difference.

Directed by Robert Luketic

Screenplay by Nicole Eastman and Karen McCullah Lutz & Kirsten Smith

Released by Sony Pictures Digital, Inc.

(Spoiler Alert!)

The new romantic comedy The Ugly Truth challenges gender stereotypes and romantic fantasies by setting them up and then knocking them down. Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler) proclaims his creed of primitive, irredeemable manhood with tent revival fervor. He is a man-bashing man who wants women to understand that they can never have the mature, mutually loving relationship they want. Yet that, we find out, is the very thing Mike had been looking for and failed to find. After a string of dismal relationships, he simply gave up on love and gave in to the truth he discovered about desire: it is easily manipulated, often borrowed and falsely aroused. All of which is very true and very ugly, if you fall into the trap that Mike has fallen into of equating desire with love. All his ranting is directed at himself, to prevent him from backsliding and believing in love once again. To protect his wounded heart, he is hiding from the truly ugly reality that he has given up on the one thing that matters most.

While Mike equates love with desire, he sees another equally ugly reality, that women equate love with romantic fantasies. He continually bashes women’s romantic fantasies of finding the perfect man. Abby Richter (Katherine Heigl) is the ideal representative of those fantasies. Abby has a list in her head of 10 qualities that her ideal man will meet and needless to say, Mike Chadway fits none of them. She pursues the wrong man, a dreamy doctor who fits all her criteria and so appears very right, with the help of Mike’s insights about desire. He coaches her to arouse his interest by pretending to be uninterested in him, feigning other relationships, laughing at his unfunny jokes, keeping all her opinions to herself, flirting shamelessly, and being sexually available to the point of fulfilling his sexual fantasies no matter how she feels about them.

While all this appears insipid and ridiculous in a movie, it is unfortunately what often passes for relationships these days. We are false with one another, manipulative in the extreme, succumb to impersonal sexual relationships, and are wildly disappointed that none of it yields anything remotely like love. This clever movie, though, dismantles all these things even as the characters proclaim them as true. For example, when Mike coaches Abby to laugh at her date’s jokes, she laughs at a joke of his. When Mike asks if she was faking, she tells him that he’ll never know, exposing his advice as permission to lie and the resulting relationship as false and untrustworthy.

After their first date, dreamy doctor says he likes Abby because he can’t figure her out. Mike’s whispered aside that the guy must be stupid, because he figured Abby out from the beginning, should not be overlooked, for I think it is a pivotal line in the movie. Mike sees Abby for who she is and so his love for her is meant to be contrasted with dreamy doctor’s love. When Abby asks dreamy doctor why he loves her, he lists all the false things that Abby has presented as her true self. The list in her head and the games she was playing produced the only thing they could produce, a relationship of lies. And when Mike finally proclaims his love, Abby asks him the same thing: why does he love her? His answer is approximately, “Damned if I know.” Finally, he tells the truth and it’s what Abby wants and needs to hear. The movie reveals the way romantic fantasies get in the way of seeing someone for who they truly are, how lies (to ourselves and others) will yield only more lies, and that love is mysteriously always possible and always worth the effort it takes to find it. I call this The Wicked Truth About Love and, despite pandering to the commercial need for an R rating, The Ugly Truth does find its way there.