Cupid, draw back your bow

…and let your cynicism go

“In the fairground of the calendar year, Valentine’s Day is the waltzer,” I once wrote, in a column so embarrassing in its unenlightenedness that I can’t recycle any more of it here. “Garish, nausea-inducing, yet somehow managing to look like everyone on it is having the time of their lives.”

I wrote this in 2009, which fell firmly in the ‘BVD’ era of my life. No, not that. ‘Before Valentine’s Day’. It was several years still before I even got my first card, a year after the Valentine’s Day where my then-boyfriend stood me up and I spent the night alone, crying into The Riverside Chaucer next to a massive homemade chocolate cake. Three years after the fateful V-Day where I thought I was on a date but ended up playing Monopoly with his sister. A full decade on from the days I would arrive at school, faintly queasy with hope that one of the boys who yelled “boffin” at me on a daily basis might have slipped a heartfelt declaration in a pink envelope into my little plastic tray. None ever did, obviously. And not just because I didn’t go to school with Alfalfa from The Little Rascals. I was thirsty for romance, and that was unfashionable even when I was 11.

No, I didn’t get a satisfactory go on Cupid’s bow and arrow until February 14th 2012, and then only because February 14th 2011 ended in a fit of indignity, crying in the street outside Muswell Hill Odeon because I’d realised no card or flowers were forthcoming.

“I… I didn’t think you’d be into Valentine’s Day!” he said. I blinked through the tears. Was it possible I had actually fooled him into thinking I was cool?

“I didn’t think anyone was actually into Valentine’s Day!”

Ah, there it was. Poor sweet boy, I thought. It wasn’t his fault really — he was a product of his social conditioning, I was a product of mine. In this damned society you’re a loser if you don’t subscribe to it all, and a loser if you do, and it’s hard to separate what you actually want from everything you feel you ought to be having. They practically forcefeed us (and I invariably mean women, but not always) syrupy, synthetic, sugar-pink lurve, then they laugh when we actually crave some.

All the years I was chronically single, I knew exactly how I felt about Valentine’s Day: scornful, cynical, extravagantly self-indulgent. But when you’re in a relationship, you have to navigate two different… let’s call them romance libidos. Who wins then? What’s the answer?

That was rhetorical, I actually have the answer. Every year since 2011 I’ve been honing my speech, and I’m going to do it for you now.

My speech is a response to all the V-Day deniers and naysayers, all the people who argue that Valentine’s Day is just commercialised kowtowing to The Man and Moonpig.com. You know the ones; they are too cool, their love is too pure and raw and authentic. Artisanal, unprocessed love. They don’t need a designated day to be romantic, they are romantic all year round! The world is their candlelit restaurant, daily life is their M&S Dine In meal deal for two!

To which I say: bollocks.

Like hell are you romantic all year round. Of course you don’t show your love enough, nobody does. We’re all too busy and too cynical, and possibly too scared. But in just the same way that you’d rarely see your friends if nobody ever had birthday drinks, sometimes you need the prod of a pre-agreed calendar event to remind you to give time to what’s really important.

Life is short; I love that Valentine’s Day gives us a push to stop being coy or cool and ‘fess up to our feelings. So my ruling for V-Day in relationships is this: whoever cares more about it, wins. Their desire to celebrate (within an appropriate budget and geography) trumps your desire to sulk in a corner.

[At this point in the speech I usually pause and look around for effect, sometimes with an emphatic finger raised in the air like a TV evangelist. Then I rev up again — ]

And of course nobody ACTUALLY wants a giant teddy, a candy thong or a glass plaque with a Purple Ronnie poem etched into it or whatever. Of course they don’t, so please let’s stop pretending that the whole appeal of Valentine’s day hinges on a hunger for crass tat and lurid, flammable lingerie. It’s a centuries-old tradition; stop making us feel like tacky simpletons for observing it.

No, what most of us want, or at least those of us snot-crying in the street outside the Odeon, is thoughtfulness. That’s it. We want a gesture that says, “the earth’s gone round the sun again, and here you are and I feel lucky to have you.” Personally [usually quite pink in the face by now] I think it takes a particularly adolescent mindset to hear the calendar telling them “make that person you love feel special!”, and reply “NO! SHAN’T!”

Because sure, the whole thing is over-hyped, over-commercialised, saccharine, nearly always anticlimactic… but then so is Christmas, and I’d never give that up either. It doesn’t do to throw the baby out with the fuschia glitter petal-sodden bathwater.

[Pause for a ripple of laughter, wipe away sweat, beatific smile]

In fact, I think the answer to enjoying Valentine’s Day is pretty similar to Christmas. You have to strip away all the layers of crap until you find the nugget of truth at the heart of it all, then polish it up with your sleeve until it shines. Make it a beacon of light in the middle of a bleak, bleak month. And that way, the holiday can be an inclusive thing again — not just a gaudy three-ring circus for the smugly coupled and the hornily courting, but a time to take stock and shower a bit of love on everyone you feel closest to.

Valentine’s Day will always be resolutely uncool, and that’s the point. So make it warm and cosy instead. Because until you’re 100% confident you’re doing your relationships justice the other 364 days a year, why would you think you’re entitled to sit this one out? WHY?

[Rapturous applause, gracious bowing]

Anyway. In 2013, I got a beautiful card and a homemade lasagne. It was lovely. Nobody cried. Five years AVD, the whole thing feels far less fraught with expectation but I am still embarrassingly, unfashionably, evangelically keen on Valentine’s Day. Plus you can get hipster cards on Etsy now, which helps.

This was originally published in the Schmancy! newsletter.