Holiday: Happy Freedom from Valentine's Day

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Alec Graven likely knows more about Valentine's Day than I do. The nine-year old author of "How to Talk to Girls" notes in his debut book that "about 73 percent of regular girls ditch boys." Lest that seem alarming, "98 percent of pretty girls ditch boys." (One wonders if he has watched a certain Tina Fey movie too many times.) Considering that I suspect men are at least as likely to "ditch" their partner as women, that would explain the high divorce rate and a lot of what I see around me in the world.

I have never celebrated Valentine's Day, at least since the first time I actually fell in love. Instead, I have always celebrated Freedom from Valentine's Day. A female friend once sent me the following note on Valentine's Day:

I'm wearing Halloween socks with spiderwebs on them to symbolize the complications and entrapments caused by relationships. Since I don't have one I can make fun of everyone else.

Needless to say, I thought she had the right idea. As I listened to my male friends complain about how difficult it was to meet the expectations of their significant others on this day, I just enjoyed not being saddled with that kind of responsibility. There is a real freedom in that.

It's hard not to view Valentine's Day as a over-commercialized day, with prices on anything potentially romantic, from roses to stuffed animals to dinner at cozy restaurants, going up substantially in price. (It's not hard to explain in personality terms, either, as cupid resembles the "small intestine" personality type in the "emotional" world that is most concerned with appearances and very sensitive to money--how could the day be celebrated be any other way?) Reservations have to be made far in advance at anyplace remotely nice, and if chocolate is forgotten, then expectations have not been met and the day is a failure.

My real problem with the concept of Valentine's Day is not the hyper-commercialization or even the expectations that someone else may have. It's the whole idea that there should be a single day to cultivate a relationship. I've always been of the opinion that every day in a relationship should be a celebration of that relationship. Of course, I've never really been in a position to test this idea around the fourteenth of February, but it seems to me that not many people (including women) are much enjoying the celebration of Valentine's Day, and would rather receive chocolate on, say, the day forecast to be the coldest day of the year or some other time that the their partner realizes they might appreciate it.

So, when I say I prefer the concept of Freedom from Valentine's Day, I'm not really calling for freedom from relationships as my friend once seemed to be. In reality, I'm really advocating working hard at a relationship on a daily basis, a constant effort that makes having to express all one's emotions on a single day--Valentine's Day--all but redundant. To achieve Freedom from Valentine's Day may actually require a whole lot more effort than Valentine's Day itself.

Which brings us back to the precocious Alec Graven, who advises: "Whatever happens, don't let it make you crazy... That's it. I am all out of ideas."