Happy UnValentine’s Day, by Paul Shirley and Jenny Bahn

1 – In Which Jenny Makes A Request

Dear Paul,

A horrible event has arrived. No, it’s not my 30^th birthday (though said birthday will come soon enough, no doubt).

I’m talking about Valentine’s Day. That pink and red and candy-coated day that has forced us to acknowledge a cold reality: Nobody wants us.

So, Paul – dear, sweet, darling Paul – distract me. Distract me from the balloons, from the flowers, from the multitude of items in my apartment I can fashion into a noose.

Tell me a story, would you?

2 – In Which Paul Complies

My freshman year of college. I’m walking from my monolithic dormitory to an 8 a.m. Calculus class that, if yesterday is any indication, is going to leave my neurons tangled into a blind man’s do-si-do. Up ahead: the weird footbridge I walk under every day while bracing for the morning’s slate of Pre-Engineering classes that are sure to be filled mostly with confusion and leastly with girls.

But first, under the bridge, then the climb up the stairs that come after.

Today, I stop in front of that bridge, for there are words on the side, chalked in red.

“Happy National Codependence Day!”

Someone’s bitter, I think.

Then,

I guess it’s Valentine’s Day.

I keep walking.

Calculus class is hard; more integrals I don’t understand. Chemistry is harder; those damned moles or mols or whatever they are. Lunch, another class, basketball practice, home, dinner, sleep. The next day comes. The words are still there. In fact, they stay for months. An homage, perhaps, to someone’s pain on a holiday we’ve made more important than we should have. A holiday that could (and probably should) be associated with children – homemade Valentines, pink cupcake parties at school, those little hearts that are so ubiquitous we’ve run out of chalky things to compare them to.

It’s been fifteen years since I saw those words scrawled on the side of the footbridge. I’ve had girlfriends on Valentine’s Day; I’ve been excited to have someone to take to dinner. I’ve not had girlfriends on Valentine’s Day; I don’t remember being all that sad that I didn’t.

My response to Valentine’s Day remains a shrug of the shoulders. Which isn’t to say that I don’t understand completely. I’d like to have a Valentine, I suppose. But how have we gotten here? So much significance placed on one day. When, really, shouldn’t the idea be to have someone all the time? Valentine’s Day is a pretty small sample size, when you get down to it. 1 out of 365. Hardly representative of the will of the year’s days.

Is it the media? Corporations? Advertising companies? Because, while my gut doesn’t understand the fuss, my head understands it just fine. My head is bombarded with reasons I should be with someone and, more important to those performing the bombardment, reasons I should buy something for someone.

But I don’t want to turn this into an indictment of corporatism. I’d rather keep it light-hearted. I’d rather talk about Valentine’s Days gone bad or Valentine’s Days gone good or Valentine’s Days gone like most Valentine’s Days: mediocre.

Along the way, perhaps we’ll figure out how Valentine’s Day has come to take on so much importance. Because I have a feeling that, in 1982, my parents were not particularly worried about what they were going to get each other for Valentine’s. At least, they weren’t anywhere near as worried as people are now.

But for now, I will send it back to you, Jenny Bahn, our resident expert in all things Feeling.

Jenny, what does Valentine’s Day make you think of?

3 – In Which Jenny Turns The CVS Valentine’s Display Into A Scary Clown

Crumbling candy hearts, little cards with Carebears and envelopes that don’t stick when you lick the seal. Folding sheets of red paper and gluing masticated doilies to the edges like a halo of spider web.

Childhood crushes on boys much too short for me.  Kids learning about how popularity works, how to make people like you, what it feels like when you’ve got not nearly enough of those candy hearts and cheap paper cards at the bottom of your Jansport.

Valentine’s Day as a child reminds me of the hope and disappointment I feel about the hope and disappointment to come as an adult. Only Valentine’s Day will essentially be every day of my fucking life, still crushed because Greg – that little boy with the blue eyes and the slicked hair who has been assigned to be my square dance partner – doesn’t love me as much as I love him.

Now, I walk through the Rite Aids, the Duane Reades, the CVS drugstores all over bloody Manhattan and I am greeted with walls of red and pink – boxes of Sponge Bob Square Pants holding a guitar and winking “Valentine, You Rock!” or one smiling bear holding another smiling bear with the words “You’re Beary Nice” scrawled in some stock typeface. I walk in the shadow of cheap chocolates and Made-in-China trinkets and I feel my cheeks burn because when you don’t believe in love, how can you believe in Valentine’s Day?

I aspire to one day be charmed by these things again. It seems my horrible and jaded cynicism is like a manic depressive psychopath. In keeping with that trend, it is very possible that, next year, I will not want to vomit when I see a fat, harp-wielding cherub.

In an effort to lighten the mood (Dear God, please lighten the mood), do you have any charmed memories of the holiday?

4 – In Which Paul Tries, Mostly In Vain, To Lighten Said Mood

Unfortunately, Paul cannot respond to this because Paul is lying in a bathtub that is now 75% water, 23% blood, and 2% tears. (To be honest, there’s probably a bit of fecal matter and definitely some urine, but we don’t want to cloud the romance of a suicide with the brutal truth of what happens when you die. DO YOU, HUMAN? YOU WANT IT TO BE BEAUTIFUL, DON’T YOU? ALL OF IT, EVEN DEATH! THAT’S WHY YOU FUCKING CELEBRATE VALENTINE’S DAY; THE THEORY OF IT ALL. THE POSSIBILITY OF EVERLASTING LOVE, OF THAT ONE PERSON WHO WILL ALWAYS LIKE YOU, EVEN WHEN YOUR HANDS ARE NOTHING BUT LIVER SPOTS AND YOU CAN BARELY READ YOUR AARP NEWSLETTER AND EVERYTHING YOU SAY IS JIBBERIS…)

Whoa, there, my ghost got a little carried away. Back in the box, you.

There, that’s better. I didn’t actually kill myself. Although it was touch-and-go there for several minutes. The godshonesttruth is that I’m at a coffee shop and it’s 75 degrees so how could I bring myself to slit my own wrists. And what, give all these wannabe screenwriters free material?

Where were we?

Pleasant memories? Let’s see. The first thing that comes to mind is this:

Last year at this time, my then-girlfriend and I were visiting Los Angeles. Both of us were considering a move to the city. (Which consideration would come to fruition, only to see us break up a month later. Fuck, I’ve already ruined the romance.) Anyway, we happened to be in L.A. for Valentine’s Day, which meant that we, of course, had to find something Valentine’s Day-ish to do. We got one half of it right – instead of going to dinner somewhere fancy, we went to In-N-Out and gorged ourselves by the light of the Blockbuster next door. That part was perfect, and if I had a suggestion to anyone seeking Valentine’s dinner suggestions, it would be this: do something weird. Go to In-N-Out, or Fazoli’s, or come home from work, say, “Feels like an Arby’s night,” and actually go to Arby’s.

Because, you see – and keep in mind that I’m no expert on love, so when I write “you see,” I mean only, “maybe you should kind of, possibly see” – there’s nothing romantic about doing what everyone else does. Romance is in the surprise.

My hypothesis is strengthened by this, the other half of last year’s Valentine’s Day. We got massages. Not a terrible Valentine’s move, you might say, except that, while I was sitting in the anteroom of some nondescript Thai massage parlor in a strip mall on Olympic Boulevard, waiting for a tiny Asian woman to do what was actually a fairly poor job of pushing and pulling on my strained muscles and ligaments, the front door opened. A young couple entered and sat down to wait next to us. For the next ten minutes, I watched the guy caress his dour, mostly-unwilling girlfriend. Then, when the receptionist came back, he strode to the counter and paid for their massages with a triumphant look on his face.

That look ruined that Valentine’s Day for me. I realized that I was no better. I, too, was here because I’d felt like I’d needed to come up with something for my girlfriend to do. I, too, had tried, in my own way, to buy her affection. And this, I suppose, is one of the things that bothers me most about Valentine’s: the idea that men are supposed to go out and purchase something – a dinner, a necklace, even a fucking massage – for their women.

Is this how far we’ve come? In this age of fairness and equal rights and all-girls Weezer cover bands? (I saw one in Montreal last fall. It was stupendous.)

Mine is not a new or revolutionary view, of course, and it’s not that I mind getting the door or picking up the check. In fact, because I was taught well by my Midwestern mother, I never don’t do those things. (Unless the girl is, you know, rich. Then, she can buy me all the Tender Greens she wants.) But on Valentine’s Day, the exchange seems so transparent and obvious and, frankly, disgusting, that it was all I could do to not grab my girlfriend’s hand and run, screaming, out of the massage store and into the arms of the nearest heroin dealer in some misguided effort to not participate in The Same Thing Everyone Else Is Doing.

My massage was ruined, that’s for sure.

Oh hey, look, I took this down a dark, philosophical path again. Way to go, me.

We’ll keep trying, though, to turn this thing around.

So, Jenny, for the sake of our inquisitive, insightful audience, what does your perfect Valentine’s Day consist of?

Gentlemen, listen up. My partner in writing is a beautiful, intelligent young woman who has traveled extensively and broken, I am confident, many hearts. If it’s good enough for her, it’s probably good enough for that troglodyte you call a girlfriend.

(That was mean. I’m sure your girlfriend isn’t a troglodyte. I’m just jealous that you have a girlfriend.)

5 – In Which Jenny Plays Savage Love

Steps to Having the Perfect Valentine’s Day

1. Meet boy. Meet boy in club, in bar, on Match.com. Meet boy in the middle of the night while he’s taking a piss on the wall outside of that fratty bar on 2nd Avenue. Meet boy in the airport after he’s already tried to meet another girl inside that same airport (you sense his flirtatiousness is as prevalent and unavoidable as the airborne diseases floating around the inside of your decrepit American Airlines 737). Meet boy in an AA meeting, outside of an AA meeting. Meet boy through the friend of a friend of a friend who warns you beforehand, “He can be a bit, err, dark.” At this point, fuck it. MEET BOY.

2. Start off cool and casual. When he asks you to dinner for the first time, you’ve already got other plans. Say something like, “Aw, sorry. How about [some number of days or hours into the future that cause enough self doubt and longing to make them think, Hey, this girl is pretty amazing, mostly because she’s got zero interest in me.] Now, if you can, do your best to really (and I mean this) maintain zero interest in this person. He’s talking; you don’t care. He tells a joke; you don’t laugh. He starts telling you some sob story about his dad and his childhood dog; you pretend to not hear the last bit about how traumatic the whole divorce has been on the entire family and you look up from your menu and ask, “Are you allergic to beets?”

3. Do not sleep with him. Do not sleep with him until you can trust him like a bank in Switzerland circa 1991. I realize Instruction No. 3 is highly aspirational, probably delusional, and likely unachievable, but, I strongly believe, this is integral to a perfect Valentine’s Day. Mostly because if you have sex with him February 11^th, you cannot guarantee he will be there Februrary 15^th. Keep your carrots, girls. I know you’d like to think your witty conversation and your Ivy League education are part of your abundant bushel of enticing carrots (“I’m sweet!  I’m funny!  I’m smart!” you say), but, the truth is, they’re not. You’ve got one carrot, and it’s about halfway between your head and your heels.

4. Remain a sexy, omnipresent fly on the proverbial wall in his brain. Don’t intrude on his life, don’t make assumptions about where you possibly fit within said life, keep your distance. Do this for enough time that his fear of you has begun to abate, that his suspicions that your goal in life is to become his horrible ball and chain, anchoring him to the basement wall of that rat-infested falafel place down in the Village for all eternity begin to fade away. Are you feeling yet? Are you being yourself? I fucking hope not.

5. Keep all thoughts to yourself. Sharing is caring. Correction: sharing is willingly strapping yourself down to the sacrificial altar and slitting your wrists on the jagged stone at the edge, bleeding yourself out in the desperate need of finding someone, ANYONE, to love you, only to have your spilled life lapped up by a bunch of mangy, blood-thirsty coyotes. Silence and repression are paramount.

6. Now, if you have followed these steps, there is a chance that said alcoholic/degenerate/penis is still hanging around. He hasn’t traded you for something less eager, prettier, taller. He hasn’t interpreted your generalized affection for him as suffocating, your enthusiasm for him as strategic. Yeah, you might be falling asleep every night in a pile of snot and tears, wishing dreadfully that you can just BE, but this isn’t about you, princess. This is about Valentine’s Day. And to have a Valentine’s Day, you have to have a Valentine. Are we all on the same page here? Good. Now pop a Xanax and calm down. Here, have a glass of wine from that bottle you bought the other day, thinking that you would invite him over for a drink. “What’s the harm in that?” you thought while deliberating the casual invite that would inevitably lead to you liking him more and more, enough that the only possible outcome was you watching him running for the hills like a jailbreak.

Actually, have the whole bottle. You deserve it.

7. A miracle! Your days/weeks/months of hard work have paid off! You have finally trapped him in your tangled web of practiced apathy. He calls.

“Hey, what are you doing next Tuesday?”

And you say, “Isn’t next Tuesday Valentine’s Day?”

And you listen to the tenuous silence on the other end of the line, that brief pause where he feels like he’s being gutted (yes, amazingly, in this experiment you have discovered that women can have that effect on men and that it does not always have to be the other way around).

“I know,” he says. “I would like to take you to dinner.”

Inside, you feel like Jackie Joyner at the finish line, sweaty and struggling, heaving and victorious. You see fireworks, celebrating your successful foray into the world of manipulation and cold heartedness. Crowds cheer. Rice is thrown. Whistles blow. A multitude of balloons fly off into the high heavens, popping as they strain towards the sun.

And you, my little doll, say casually and simply into the bottom of your phone, “Oh.”

6 – In Which Paul Conceives Of A New Holiday And Asks A Question

What you’re saying, Jenny, is that it goes both ways? That each of us – male and female – has this power? The power to cause sleepless nights and restless mornings and afternoons spent wondering when will she call? This amazes me, much as it amazes you, I think. I cannot imagine, not really, that I could cause someone such turmoil.

How miraculous, that it ever works out. So many ebbs and flows in one great power struggle. Because it is a power struggle – love, a relationship, Valentine’s Day. A melancholy thought, surely. Everything in which we engage, up to and including the thing we hold in the highest regard (love) is a lesson in economics: what can you give me that I can’t get somewhere else for less cost, less investment, less toil and strife.

Or maybe that’s only how I see it because, on this Valentine’s Day, I’m not directly involved in the transaction. I’m watching the checkout girl from outside Ralph’s, wondering how she handles dealing with the monotony, day after day.

This year, I’m evaluating. And I suppose that’s what Valentine’s Day could be thought to be about. A time for self-reflection. For some, the reflection on how well it’s going. For others, the reflection on how well it’s not. For you and I, the reflection on how it isn’t going at all.

A New Year’s Day, for love. Just as pointless, if you want to be one of those people who says, “What does it matter what date I have to write on my checks [we’ve imagined ourselves a check-writer, it seems]; today is no different from yesterday than yesterday was from two days ago.”

Or just as impactful, if you want to be one of those Resolvers – one of the ones who signs up for the yoga class, quits the job, plans the trip to Switzerland.

Where it gets tricky is the vantage point. We’re told we should want to be inside the grocery store, participating in the purchase, passing money and getting change. We’re left feeling like we’ve failed, as if, in the game of Life vs. Me, we’re behind on everyone’s scorecard.

But this – and don’t let me get too hippie-dippy, Jenny  – is a decision of our own making. It all depends, as they say, on how you look at it.

That great philosopher of our time, Louis C.K., says that everyone always responds to a divorce the same, wrong way. “Oh, I’m sorry,” they say. They forget, Mr. C.K. says, that people don’t end good marriages. People don’t quit being married because it’s going so well.

You and I and some indeterminate percentage of the people reading this are not in stable, loving relationships. We could decide that this is tragic, indeed.

Or we could take the opposite view: we’re not in unstable, unloving relationships. We could decide that this is worthy of celebration, in its own right.

We don’t have to say that in the way that some group of thirty-something women are saying it as I write. That is, in a “Fuck men and relationships and I’m gonna have, like, six margaritas at Chili’s tonight” kind of way. Something more peaceful and well, hippie-dippy. (You were supposed to keep me out of here.) Something that incorporates a quiet confidence (one that we probably don’t always feel) that everything will work out, that we will, one day – maybe for a few weeks, maybe for a few months, maybe for a few years – find an equal partner in our own transaction of love.

In the meantime, we celebrate a different holiday. Not Anti-Valentine’s Day. Instead, UnValentine’s Day. The shadow holiday for those of us who aren’t participating this year. The holiday for people who recognize that there is sadness to be found in not having the right Valentine, but who recognize that there is joy to be found in not having the wrong Valentine.

A holiday of reflection, our UnValentine’s Day. A holiday whose only pressure is nonexistent. And a holiday whose pricetag, let’s be honest, is remarkably attractive.

So, on this UnValentine’s Day, I am inspired to ask this final question – the last that I’ll ask before I’ll turn this over to you, so that you can put the poetic capstone into the commiseratory footbridge we’ve built:

Will you be my UnValentine?

7 – The Conclusion, In Which Jenny Answers Paul’s Question

Though it does nothing to assuage the terror that I will be alone forever, that I will never find my Valentine Valentine, that I am aging every minute of every day and no one will ever want me…

Yes, Paul.  Yes, I will be your UnValentine. And, apparently, a very cheap date.

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