Hum, Valentine's Day came and went and nothing is really changed in our little blue world or indeed, the lives of those who live on it. Flowers, chocolate, a bit of sex while listening to Eric Clapton, instead of the generally preferred (and more honest) Barry White? So what? You really had to wait for an 1840s relic celebration, its origin all but forgotten but aptly taken advantage of by every person with a grain of sense for marketing? Seriously, why do so many people make such a fuss over this thing? Are they devout Catholics who happened to know of the three martyred Valentines (who in time, were struck out of the catholic calendars, bar specific ones, due to lack of information)? Are they 15th century French noblemen? Why do people feel the need to reassess their perfectly fine relationships, because of a holiday not even the Church (the people who make holidays in the western world, remember?) aknowledges?
Furthermore, not having been forced to bother with such thinking earlier and people just loving to be paranoid or dissatisfied with well, nothing, most end up breaking up! Though such statistics are not very precise on a worldwide scale, as far as I have been able to tell from my surroundings, people rather tend to break-up, get broken-hearted or at the very least dumped on such days, because they are mistakenly led to believe that anything is special about the 14th of February. Men use it as an excuse to ask for sex and women as an excuse to test you "on the Holiday of True Love". Both are full of shit if they waited for that specific date, whilst they could have done any of these things at any other opportune moment.
Yes, there may have been a point when you were in puberty and too shy to otherwise ask for a kiss or a date and you were bolstered by the shared naivete of your peers, making sure you would have support in either outcome. However, of what I have seen, children merely a decade younger than us are much more cynical and informed on "love", yet people our age, who have been together no longer than a year, find it necessary to follow the rituals of popular marketing, in order to "please or take the measure of their mate", ultimately understanding how little they know of each other and putting their relationship under unnecessary strain.
People, grow up! Assess your feelings and challenge each other when it really makes sense, instead of waiting for a landmark date that ended up being established in its popularized form by the daughter of a bookstore owner in Massachusetts. If you are truly single and get miserable on this day, go out more often, have fun, meet people and get your gear going instead of waiting for a florist's or chocolatier's miracle. Finally, if, dammit, you have a relationship, a flawed one even - usually the case, say hello to human nature - but which makes you feel good by the general presence of your partner, stop reading this and go cuddle, laugh, start doing it like rabbits even. Living is much more important than calendar-based considerations.
And since Ergo Proxy has been silent for a while, when I am typing this, I present you, on his behalf, with the Valentine's Day card for next year, when you will be wiser.
Harsh, cynical but at least it's more honest than 95% of the "I will love thee forevermore" of that day.
Signing off,
Speedgrapher and Ergo Proxy
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