Think "Big Picture"

I hated Valentine's Day. I've always hated Valentine's Day. In elementary school, there was so much pressure to choose the "right" kind of Valentine. Were the X-Men still cool enough? Were they cool enough that I wouldn't get laughed at? What if someone else got the same package? That could be embarrassing. I had to give one to everyone too...even the people I didn't like. Sometimes people would give out candy and be liked for it, sometimes they had the misfortune of choosing the wrong sort. These are crippling decisions for a third-grader. Mom would usually end up getting frustrated and choose for me and, of course, none of my concerns were ever confirmed, but I couldn't escape playing the "what if" game. I hated Valentine's Day.

By middle school, Valentine's Day became more exclusive; such cards were only exchanged among friends and couples. I had rather few of the former and none of the latter. It was somewhere in here that Valentine's Day started to become something else: Singles' Awareness Day. I was thrilled to have escaped the pressure of choosing valentines to be distributed to my classmates, but I always sorta wished I got more. I hated Valentine's Day.

High school. Oh, high school. A lot of the people I know think back on their high school years with a those-were-the-days sort of nostalgia. It's a pretty resounding 'meh' in my memory. Some good things, some bad, a lot of lukewarm feelings. I escaped the first two years' Valentine's through a combination of homework and not caring. The "holiday" came and went all but unnoticed. At some point though, I got a girlfriend, and did she turn out to be a doozy! We started dating right around Valentine's Day, which also happened to be right around her birthday, and she'd had a crush on me for some time. I got lots of romantic bonus points for that...not that I had any idea at the time. For a while, I almost cared about the day; I would be able to combine holidays! What guy doesn't want that? Then we broke up. Badly. Whether through maturity or some other mechanism, I'd moved beyond hating Valentine's toward just not caring. I didn't care about Valentine's Day.

College was a fair bit of the same. I spent most of my time working, pretending to work, and playing games (in reverse order). The day came and went nearly without notice. I only knew because my roomie had a girlfriend and he knew better than to forget. Four whole years passed, and I still didn't care about Valentine's Day.

At last, real life...is pretty much more of the same. I get to see my friends more often. I'm still single, unemployed as of this writing, and I'm at my computer at 4am writing about Valentine's Day. I still think Valentine's Day is another manufactured, girl-centric holiday almost wholly designed to make the male halves of relationships worry about gifts or be lured into traps. There's a devious undercurrent to the whole thing that bothers me. Nonetheless, I think I'm starting to understand the hubbub.

I started off thinking about Valentine's Day as an extension of the ongoing school popularity contests to which I never learned the rules. After that, it was a reminder that others had something I could only just understand, much less obtain. Then, it just sort of stopped mattering for a while. It fell from the general consciousness and was taken care of more privately. And now, with some perspective and, I like to think, a bit of maturity, I see this in a different light. Valentine's Day, like most other holidays, is a day to reflect on relationships of any sort. Sure, a lot of the commercial emphasis is on romantic connections, but there's more to it. This is a day to dedicate to your most important connections.

Come what may, we'll always have friends and family. Keep them close.