my funny valentine or why valentine's day is corporate and that's ok

This is a defense of love.

Or maybe more appropriately "Eros." I will refer to it as such for the rest of this essay for simplicity's sake and also because this is how C.S. Lewis dubs it in his book The Four Loves, which forms the basis of my writing.

Every year as the calendar days begin to fall precipitously and dangerously toward February 14, Eros begins to take fire from all sides.

"Valentine's Day is so corporate and commercialized."  "It's nothing but a capitalist conspiracy among the greeting card companies to prop up a make-believe holiday to boost a slow month in sales."  (What?  So you're telling me I can't get a Black History Month card with a sweet picture of George Washington Carver recounting the numerous and glorious uses of the peanut?  And why is this the only thing I can remember from countless public school history classes taught during the month of February?)

So people declare their independence of the evil capitalist machinery, defy the man, and declare their own holidays.  Anti-Valentine's Day.  Ferris Wheel Day.  National Singlehood Awareness Day.  And on and on.  Mostly this is done out of the bitterness that one does not have an appointed valentine to celebrate the day with.  In my opinion though, the lady (or man) doth protest too much.  If anyone declares their worship for Eros, it is the unValentines.  There is no opt-out for love.  We will all love something.  The question is what.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Now I could devote several hundred words to debunking the myth that the evil corporate behemoths of Hallmark and Godiva have manipulated our emotions by forcing their black holiday on us all.  But that's what Wikipedia is for.  And a quick reading of the Valentine's Day entry will show you that the name originates with early Christian martyrs and draws its romantic roots from the days of Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales.

But skip that and let's use a little rhetorical device we lawyers refer to as "assuming arguendo."  So I grant your point: Valentine's Day is a corporate sellout of a holiday foisted upon us as a cruel hoax to convince us to buy copious amounts of greeting cards and chocolates.  My response: So what?

Have you ever noticed that corporations always co-opt stuff that is awesome?  Like Christmas and love and puppies.  We just sat a Super Bowl last week that half the people in the audience were watching solely for the purpose of being sold products through ingenious advertising.  Thousands of people tuned in via the internet for the Steve Jobs to unleash his brilliant move forward in technology for a supersize iPod touch.  When is the last time you saw a corporation spending $2.5 million for a commercial advocating the many desirable qualities of strained peas?  Corporations don't make us want things.  They find things we already want and find ways to make money off selling it to us.

One thing we definitely want, have always wanted, and will always want for as long as the human race subsists is Eros.

So what defines our love/hate relationship with Eros?  Fear.  We are afraid.  And, on the one hand, we have good reason to fear.  Eros is a fearful and brutal master of our emotions, our physical and spiritual well-being.  Never do we feel closer to the truly divine, the unconditional state of love reserved for God Himself then when we declare of our beloved, "anything for you."  We have a healthy distrust of such heavenly, eternal feelings expressed on the drab, mortal earth.  As Lewis writes, "When natural things look most divine, the demoniac is just round the corner."

Yet Eros, fickle Eros, the subject of countless songs and limitless reveries, of all the types of love is the most transitory.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  For no reason but with much protestation.  As easily as one can fall in love without realizing the event is even taking place, the sudden realization of being out of love may come as the even greater surprise to the afflicted party.  This is our second fear and is both unwise and unvirtuous.  While the first was prudent for protecting our right relationship and allegiance with Love Himself, the second fear is a betrayal of that relationship and turning away from the spirit-discerning fire that God presents in the form of Eros.  Again, Lewis explains it much better than I could ever hope.

Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as 'Careful! This might lead you to suffering.' ... When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ.  If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities.  I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him less.

When I took my first job out of law school, I found myself for the first time with a 401k to manage and sitting in front of a financial adviser asking me the foreign yet primary philosophical question of my existence, "Would you like a low, moderate, or high risk of investment?"  You see, in life, there will be risk.  The only question is how much we will risk, how brave we will be.  There are more grievous sins in this life than cowardice.  Like foolishness.  The foolishness of believing that we can have one attitude toward Eros and our fellow human beings without having that attitude affect our relationship with God.  How can we ever lead ourselves to believe that we could take some safe route, low-risk strategy toward love in this life while expecting to be united to Love Himself in the next?

If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not.  We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour.  If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it. 

A survey of the biblical narrative leaves one thoroughly convinced that the story of human existence is the Love Story, the one of which all the Dear Johns and Valentine's Days of the world are but faint and imperfect shadows.  The mystery to which Saint Paul referred to as the fated marriage of Christ and his bride, the Church.  Love did not pursue us carefully but recklessly from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Gethsemane, from Mount Sinai to Mount Calvary.

We should not turn our backs on Saint Valentine's Day.  It is truly a holy day.  And in this world of hate, we could use a few more days to celebrate Love.

(This installment is a second excerpt from my future book, How to Date an Unattainable Woman and Other Things I Don't Know.  Previously excerpted here.)

Half of my problems I blame on Taylor Swift, the other half on Twilight

(An excerpt from my upcoming book to be entitled: How to Date an Unattainable Woman and other things I don't know)

I once had a girlfriend who told me to stop trying so hard in my pursuit of her. No matter how original or creative my date ideas, no matter how scripted my witty banter, no matter how earnestly delivered my compliments it wasn't what she was really looking for. "This isn't a movie," she would say. About the time I was spreading rose petals all over my dining room table in my apartment to prepare a candlelight dinner for two on Valentine's Day, I thought she was a fool.

Now I think she might be the only normal person I know.

See, we have a common affliction in our culture and I am relatively certain that every person in my generation suffers from the same fundamental problem. We don't want to be in love. We want to be in love in a movie.

Chuck Klosterman addresses this problem in his book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.

I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack. Under certain circumstances, this would have been fine; Cusack is relatively good-looking, he seems like a pretty cool guy (he likes the Clash and the Who, at least), and he undoubtedly has millions of bones in the bank. If Cusack and I were competing for the same woman, I could easily accept losing. However, I don't really feel like John and I were "competing" for the girl I'm referring to, inasmuch as her relationship to Cusack was confined to watching him as a two-dimensional projection, pretending to be characters who don't actually exist. Now, there was a time when I would have thought that detachment would have given me a huge advantage over Johnny C., inasmuch as my relationship with this woman included things like "talking on the phone" and "nuzzling under umbrellas" and "eating pancakes." However, I have come to realize that I perceived this competition completely backward; it was definitely an unfair battle, but not in my favor. It was unfair in Cusack's favor. I never had a chance.

I'm not going to blame John Cusack. Not because John Cusack isn't still cool or as formidable a foe for me as he was for Kolsterman but I just feel like his cultural relevancy has somewhat dwindled. So who then shall be my greatest nemesis the person I will forever be locked in a clash of the ages with yet all the while be only further delaying my inevitable demise?

Personally, I am no match for Edward Cullen.

I know this because I am 27 years old and single. I spend much of my free time trying to get girls to think I am smart or funny or charming or whatever it is that I think that women find desirable that day. But I will always fail. Because what women really want me to be is Edward Cullen. Yet I am not immortal, I do not have perfect hair and bone structure, I do not sparkle in the sunlight, I do not often allow my shirt to be blown open effortlessly by a gentle breeze, and I shower far too often to resemble the fantastical vampire anti-hero in the center of the adoration of millions of "Twihards." I will never be Edward Cullen because Edward Cullen does not exist.

People do not write scripts for me to attempt to deliver unironically the cheese-dripping melodrama of angst-ridden proclamation of teen love. To the best of my knowledge no one has ever accused me of "smoldering."

People don't expect those kinds of things out of real life. In the real world, things are never as epic as the movies and so they are never as satisfying. In the movies, people fall in love while risking certain death or saving the world from nuclear holocaust or while fighting evil clans of rogue werewolves. In real life, people can fall in love while eating pancakes. Don't get me wrong. I love I.H.O.P as much as anyone but I'm not setting my screenplay there. Still, shouldn't true love still be as satisfying in real life as it is in the movies?

Which brings me to Taylor Swift. She has become a cultural icon for her purity, innocence and dissatisfaction with boys in general. Despite her tender age, she has become an incredibly powerful symbol for postmodern angst. (Not only has she become this larger than life force of celebrity but she is also keenly self-aware enough to unironically croon the lyrics of "White Horse" simultaneously embodying the unfilled promises of an entire generation's longing for love while also diagnosing herself as part of the problem. This is no small feat to accomplish before being able to play a club without wearing a special wristband.)

Her biggest single to date, "Love Story," is a comptemporary reworking of Romeo and Juliet imagery in the form of an uptempo, radio-prepackaged power pop ballad.

Romeo save me I've been feeling so alone
I keep waiting for you but you never come
Is this in my head? I don't know what to think
He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring

And said, marry me Juliet
You'll never have to be alone
I love you and that's all I really know
I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress
It's a love story baby just say yes

As Swift croons out the lyrics, she exposes her own double-mindedness about the essential nature of love. Romeo has been chasing her the entire time yet she can't help but feel alone. Togetherness is not enough for our modern Juliet. Melodramatic, scene-stealing kisses and grand gestures worthy of John Cusak are her aim instead of the less glossy images of the realities of love. She doesn't want a man; she wants a script. She wants a love story and she wants it to be in high definition.

I am choosing to interpret the most interesting lyric as existential mediation on the current state of love as a function of the human condition. "Is this in my head? I don't know what to think." Who does?

In a culture inundated with images of love burned into celluloid, is it possible that we have culturally anesthetized ourselves to the point that we can no longer recognize the gritty realities of love when we see them?

What I am saying is that it is at least arguably possible that real love is better than movie love.

That happily ever after is the most overrated concept in all of human existence. True love stories never end. They play themselves out in perpetuity in the scenes that find the cutting room floor, in late morning pancake breakfasts and comfortable silences. The sappy, heartstrings-tugging musical number may fade out when the credits roll but the dance survives even without music.

What we must do is reject a culture that sets us up for failure by forcing us to compare ourselves against impossibly beautiful stars and idyllic settings, against flawless writing and effortless dénouements. Appreciate the reality of longer, more enduring stories. The ones we don't watch but instead live.

We should learn to appreciate the kind of love that happens over pancakes.