The Valentine's Date Massacre

I don't really have a fondness for Valentine's Day. Its not that I have a problem with the celebration of love in all its forms. Its just that why do adults single it out for just one of its forms: our partners? Don't we remember the lessons of elementary school where we had to bring a valentine for everyone? The focus of the day should be on telling people who aren't your significant other that you love them. Don't you think?

As a day for one-on-one love it has never really worked out well for me. Focusing on "the one" has been my downfall with Valentine's day ever since the 3rd grade when some smart-ass classmate of mine saw that I had given my biggest valentine to one of the boys and not one of the girls. He made unrelenting and public fun of me. I had yet to develop the skill-set necessary to keep my secret out of view but I was becoming a quick study on its necessities. ( I'm not sure I even knew what my secret was then anyway.) The day has had a tendency to be unkind to me ever since!

I think that the worst Valentine's Days aren't when you are single but rather when you are 'not quite coupled'. It is in this state where you are forced to submit to the pressures of the day and go through the motions even though you and your date aren't quite "ready for prime time". What should have been just a regular date on Valentines Day takes on new dimensions. Its is precisely on these types of dates where I have had the most "colorful" Valentine's experiences. The one my friends now call "The Valentine's Date Massacre" is one of the most notable: I had been seeing my date for just a few weeks. He seemed nice enough, showed up with flowers (nice) and took me to a fancy restaurant close to my home (very nice!) Somewhere in between salad and dinner he suddenly started to confide in me his frequent violations of the restraining order his former lover had on him. He gloated over the repeated calling him 50 times a day, the stealing his mail, and how he put nails in his car tires while he was shopping at Alberton's. Seriously? By the time desert arrived (why did I order that souffle?) he was actually in tears and I was making silent plans to walk home hoping against hope that he would not remember where exactly I lived.



The picture up top is actually from my favorite Valentine's Day. I kept him and marvel every day that he actually kept me too. I spent days planning the perfect 6 course meal and pulling out all the stops. The appetizers on that platter were heart shaped crostini piped with pink salmon cream. In fact, several of the dishes that night were heart shaped! How lame! I even decorated the room with a flock of 50 red birds whirling about in an homage to a special inside joke that we share. (You can see only a few of them in the photo.) I was so excited to be actually cooking for someone I actually loved that I lost track of how many pink cocktails I had been drinking and passed out minutes after desert was served -- waking up a few hours later only to vomit and crawl back in bed! (How did I get there?) Wasn't THAT a special evening? Good times.

Despite that awkward display of love (thankfully he did not take out a restraining order after that) we are still very together and proud daddies of a cat. I'm not going to tell you what we are doing this Valentine's but suffice it to say it is a much lower key affair these days. Just the way I like it: sharing love with the many in our life and not just 'the one' -- just as our teachers thought was best.