Isn’t it Romantic?

There are those who hate Valentine’s Day so much they use it as an excuse to drink their ego out of the driver’s seat so they can hand the keys to their id. Then when the inevitable I’m-so-miserable-and-alone drunken meltdown occurs, it seems organic, and friends feel obliged to give the woe-is-me gal what she wanted all along: a pity party.

Then there are those who hate Valentine’s Day haters. Hostility towards a Hallmark holiday isn’t as evolved as cool indifference. You might as well just change your status to pathetic looser.

Then, of course there are the re-appropriators, who go to see the Vagina Monologues or do something that involves herbal tea (or cosmos), validating feelings, and saying the words ‘nourishing’ and ‘empowering.’

I try not to feel anything about the day. I guess you could say I’m a hopeless romantic who finds romance hopeless.

I’m advocating for a different sort of romance this Valentine’s day. Not romance in the candlelight dinner and dozen roses sense, but romance in the classic sense of the word. Historically, Romanticism is associated with idealism and fantasy, and by no means am I promoting a rose-colored-glasses approach to the world. Yet while an unfiltered world view might be more real, it is also colder and harder, and can easily dampen passion and desire. So the romance I’m referring to is the kind that warms, not scalds. A flame fed with the fodder of knowledge and experience sustains a slow burn.  A dramatic firecracker may look beautiful, but it quickly burns itself out.