When arrows don't penetrate... Cupid grabs the pistol

Happy...eh, whatever. Sorry, folks, I just don't have it in me. Don't get me wrong - I think all of those "Valentine's day is a greeting card holiday" people are kidding themselves. Yeah, it IS a greeting card holiday...it IS pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things...but no matter how cynical you are, you can't help but take stock of your romantic life on February 14th. It's kinda like New Year's that way - somewhere there's an unwritten law that says you have to feel lonely if you don't have someone, and be madly in love if you do. The problem is, most people I know don't have great Valentine's Days. Most of the time, I'm not with anyone on V-Day, and when I am, I find I have less than stellar celebrations for this holiest of crap holidays. You're either emotionally checked out of a relationship but don't have the heart to break up with them right around Valentine's, or you're involved in a relationship where the OTHER party is checked out. Even when I've been dating someone I was really into (and vice versa), it seems there's always some reason that a great romantic evening just doesn't happen. It's one of those things (again, not unlike New Year's) where you have such high expectations that really can't ever be lived up to. That being said, I've spent a lot more Valentine's Days alone than I have with anyone, checked out or not. And being a single girl of a certain age, I have resigned myself to certain rituals because they simply cannot be avoided:

1. Watch some sort of romantic movie
2. Drink copious amounts of wine
3. Buy heart-shaped box of chocolates on clearance
4. Wallow
5. Repeat as needed
6. (optional) Buy self flowers because dammit, they're pretty

Now this year I was smart and did (1) and (2) early - over the weekend. The movie of choice this year: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The wine: the cheap sauv blanc I alluded to in my previous entry. Usually I do the truly masochistic thing of a Before Sunrise/Before Sunset double-header, but I think I've hit on something with Eternal Sunshine. First of all, the movie takes place on Valentine's Day - that has to count for something. It always makes me cry, but doesn't leave me depressed. This is important. The problem with the BS/BS-DH is that it makes me yearn. Those movies appeal to my idealistic, sappy, hopeless romantic side, and make me long for that kind of ridiculous, passionate, imperfect and yet somehow ideal romantic connection - the sort of thing I mock ceaselessly when reality show contestants talk about it. Eternal Sunshine, on the other hand, is about what love really is - again, ridiculous, imperfect, and passionate - and usually finite. I often say that a person's greatest strength is often closely intertwined with their greatest weakness - that which we most pride ourselves on is often a clue to what we are most insecure about, and similarly, that which we love and find adorable in another person at first, we eventually resent and find irritating. Love, and relationships, need to be dynamic to survive. In my personal experience, I know I'm really in love when someone can thoroughly irritate me and yet I still think to myself, "I love this person" - the interactions change... some degrade while others strengthen... your very definition of what it is to love someone changes... and whether the relationship lasts or doesn't, you learn something just by feeling. Even when it doesn't work out - even if you KNOW it's not going to work out - loving someone is still worth doing. It may sound trite, but that's comforting to me. My Magic 8-Ball may have lied to me (it said I would go out on a date by Valentine's Day, and I've got approximately...40 minutes to go and am thinking it's a bust) but maybe someday soon I'll find someone brave enough to say, "Okay." In the meantime, I offer you, my humble readers, a wee Valentine:

There. Now you can tell your friends you got flowers for Valentine's Day.