Wanna skip the essay? Here’s the playlist.
Valentine’s Day can be complicated, even in a stable, loving, committed relationship. At least for an overthinker like me.
I’m sure my wife would sometimes appreciate the basic-ness, the normcore-itue, the sheer “mundanity” of being married to somebody who could simply take Valentine’s Day at face value, buy the dang long-stemmed red roses1 for crying out loud, and not get all tangled up in all the overthinking subtext like:
it’s a holiday mostly manufactured by greeting card companies for capitalist gainzz
it’s an arbitrarily agreed-upon day2 for us to get all schmoopy with each other. Herd mentality ACTIVATE!
the gift giving usually isn’t even that creative3, featuring cliche after cliche after heart4-shaped5 cliche (to maximize mass production, if you wanna get even more cynical)
restaurants are more packed and more expensive because of the aforementioned arbitrarily agreed-upon day
flowers cost more than if you were to buy them on, say, February 7 or February 21
the unnatural pressure to be schmoopy in public induces nausea
plus the social media competitiveness of couples trying to outschmoop each other (as well as their friends/family/followers) is gross; when did love become a competition?
the absurdity (and romance) of the grand (and expensive) gestures feels too much; sorry, but a small thoughtful, unpublished gesture in June means far more than a big-ticket purchase on the arbitrarily agreed-upon day that’s also posted on Instagram for likes
high, high (unrealistic) expectations, which we all know are just resentments under construction; I would bet many couples’ favorite days were not uber-planned, ultra-pressured (unless it’s your wedding day in which case, good for you) but just…happened.
on top of all of this, just the fact that I am fundamentally someone who hates being told what to do6, how to do it, and when to do it…especially when all of it is arbitrary
I know. So unbearably romantic of me, right? Must be a real hoot to be married to Paul. My cognitive dissonance regarding the holiday doesn’t mean I don’t observe it faithfully and romantically-under-the-circumstances. It doesn’t even mean I don’t have a real, hopeless (and hopeful) romantic at my core. I do. Like I said at the top, it’s just kinda complicated for me.
All of that to overthinkingly set up this:
I love love songs. And you know what else I love? Sad, heartbreak songs. The sweet and the sour. The yin and yang. The John and the Paul. The heat and the fat7. So, whatever your Valentine’s Day may look like this year, here’s a playlist that juggles a little of both the love and the heartbreak, with some of my favorite songs about both sides of love.
I get flowers every year, for what it’s worth. Even when she says stuff like, “oh, we can skip all that this year.” I’m no dummy.
Am I against the celebration of love? Absolutely not. I just have (bulleted) reservations and questions and suspicions about the idea of a universal love day. Any meaningful relationship should have unique dates of its own—from as simple and obvious as wedding anniversaries to The Day We Met or what about The Day We First Kissed or even The Day He/She/We Said I Love You or The Day We Both Knew, and on and on. To me, a good, celebration-worthy relationship would have its own intrinsic important dates. You shouldn’t need some arbitrarily agreed-upon Important Romance Day. Much less one that marks up the price. (Do my complaints about the financial side of Valentine’s Day make my transformation into Certified Old Tightwad complete? Maybe. But, to be fair, I overspend for anniversaries and Christmas and birthdays, when it counts.)
I know a guy whose Valentine’s Day gift for his wife was RAM. Not the Paul McCartney solo album, but the computer memory. Shockingly, his gift was not a hit.
In the linked Spotify playlist, you’ll find my friend Stephanie Mabey’s spectacular song “Heart-Shaped Hologram”, which takes the cliche shape and gives it new life. Cliches aren’t all bad; it all in how you do it. And Stephanie’s song is a fantastic new flip on the old heart shape.
I was short on ideas this year and consequently part of my gift was…avocado-shaped?
Polls have shown that most men plan on spending $229.54, while women plan to spend $97.77. All because Hallmark said so.
I actually dug this duality—the fat and the heat. I was drafting off of the tv show Salt Fat Acid Heat (which reduces down cooking to those four nouns). But it was interesting to think about fat and heat, in relation to the young side of love and the older side. Not that the heat has to leave (and not that you have to become physically obese). Just that the way the two played with each other in this metaphor was interesting to me. For what it’s worth, when fat meets heat, things get pretty interesting.