Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, and I’m thinking about love. I’m writing this column from an apartment in Rome, home of Saint Valentine—a happy coincidence I discovered from a quick skim of Wikipedia. The story goes that Valentine was imprisoned for performing illegal weddings for soldiers, who had been forbidden to marry by the Roman Empire (single men were thought to make better servicemen). However, there actually aren’t any records of that marriage ban, and V-Day only began being celebrated as a day of love in the fourteenth century, after Chaucer wrote poetry making an association between the saint and romance. So really, the story of Saint Valentine being a martyr for love is probably made up, which seems fitting, since the modern way we celebrate the day is equally contrived.
Most of us know that Valentine’s Day is a commercial ploy to sell chocolate and jewelry, and an excuse for normies to grope in public. Yet if you’re like me, you still suffer from Valentine’s-induced anxiety. But why do we buy into it, over and over again? Well, partly because we don’t have much of a choice. It’s like Christmas: You have to participate, otherwise you’re the Grinch. And if you’re someone with a partner/lover, ignoring Valentine’s Day makes you look like a thoughtless meanie, so the issue then becomes what sort and how much of an effort you should make, which of course is incredibly stressful. If you make too big of an effort, you come across as a cheesy basic-bitch who cares too much about an embarrassing capitalist holiday. However, if your lover outdoes you, you also look bad. Paradoxically, even though I hate V-Day, if my partner doesn’t do anything special for me, I get all annoyed like, “Uh, hello, it’s Valentine’s Day!?!”
On the other hand, if you don’t have a date on Valentine’s Day you feel like a loser. Rationally, one should understand that not getting laid on February 14 doesn’t make you any more of a loser than not getting laid on February 13 or 15, but it’s hard to be rational when the sparkly cardboard hearts and boxes of cheap chocolate that clutter the world at this time of year are constantly reminding you that you suck for being alone. February 14 is more than a day of love—it becomes a day of disappointment and paranoia. But beyond all of this, I don’t like Valentine’s Day because it reduces something as beautiful, intimate, and complex as love into a series of obligatory, thoughtless gestures.
A handful of Valentine’s Days ago I was in London, waiting for my then-boyfriend to pick me up in a cab for dinner, feeling uneasy about the fact that whatever gift he had gotten me would undoubtedly far outweigh what I had gotten him, which was a beat-up copy of White Noise by Don DeLillo that I had just finished reading. I was living in a squatted commune at the time, along with (among others) a young Irish couple, both unemployed artists. As I was waiting, I watched them exchange gifts in the common room. The boy held his wrapped package, weighing it in his hands, feeling it with his fingers. “It feels like meat,” he said. I was shocked, not expecting it to be true. He opened it, and, low and behold, it was meat—specifically a steak that his girlfriend had found while Dumpster diving outside of a high-end supermarket. Still packaged, it had been thrown out by the store that morning for passing its sell-by date. The boy was overjoyed. “I’ve been craving steak!” he yelled. “I know, I went looking for it specifically!” the girl replied. It was a surprisingly cute moment, but at the time, I remember thinking they were disgusting, relieved to not have their lives. Years later, though, I can’t remember the details of what my boyfriend and I did that evening, or even what he got me, but I’ve told the garbage-meat story more times than I can remember. It would be an understatement to say that the gift made an impression on me.
In my opinion, the most romantic gifts are when a person gets you something only they could have gotten for you. Ideally, a gift is a gesture that demonstrates intimacy, sincerity and genuine affection, and those types of gestures are almost never formulaic or done out of obligation. Personally, I don’t like being given flowers on special occasions. Call me cynical, but nothing translates as “I didn’t think about this gift at all” more than a store-bought bouquet of roses. Equally, buying someone an expensive necklace on Valentine’s Day doesn’t compensate for being a lazy partner, just like saying “I love you” isn’t the same as acting in a loving, respectful way.
If you’re newly in love, what I’m saying means nothing. You probably think I’m talking nonsense and that’s because you’re high. For you, Valentine’s Day is just another opportunity for you and your lover to bask in your overwhelming admiration for each other, and nothing you could do on this day or any other (for the time being) will ever feel forced. In his book A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes describes being in love as experiencing “disreality.” In other words, you suddenly feel like you’re looking through the world through a glass partition; you’re constantly distracted, even while doing things you usually enjoy; you feel nauseous; it becomes impossible to engage with life in any normal way.
But this article isn’t for the newly in love, it’s for those who are dating or single, and for the people who love someone. Loving someone is the stage that comes after being in love. Moving on from being “in love” to “loving” shouldn’t be seen as negative or a loss of intensity, but rather as a natural evolution into a different phase of affection, and also as a survival instinct, since being “in love” is an unsustainable act (remember: disreality, nausea, living in a glass box). But you do have to be more careful in the loving stage, because that’s when it becomes easier to take your partner for granted, or become lazy, or to start using “the formula.”
The most romantic (and really just the best) gift I was ever given was on a random day in January of 2013. At the time, I was living in a very small room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my bed was just a mattress on the floor, and I would constantly complain that I didn’t have enough room to store all of my stuff. I had gone upstate to visit my family for the weekend, and when I returned, I walked into my apartment to find that my girlfriend had built me a bed frame, lifted high off the ground, and that she had placed storage containers underneath. Like she literally built the bed out of wood with her bare hands as if she was Superwoman or something. I was so impressed. It was unexpected, thoughtful, and I can’t imagine anyone else but her doing that for me.
If you’re alone this Valentine’s Day, just remind yourself how silly and arbitrary the holiday is, and be thankful that you’re not involved in pointless stress. And if you’re with someone, rather than follow the formula, be thoughtful and imaginative. Or here’s a thought: Turn off your screen and give your person your full self. Don’t just ask about their day because it’s what you say, listen. Touch them with tenderness, and don’t brush their lips with a kiss before you say goodbye. Give them a foot rub, be extra generous in bed, look them in the eye, whatever. In an ideal relationship, every day would be a day of love. But rather than using Valentine’s Day to make up for our shortcomings, let’s use it to remind ourselves of all the little things we can do to make our partner’s life easier and better, and all the subtle ways we can show that we love and respect them every day.
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.
Hair by Eric Jamieson; Makeup by Georgi Sandev
On Sciortino: Chanel cashmere cardigan ($2,150) and cashmere pullover ($1,850); Chanel, NYC, 212.355.5050
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