Just four days to go, and about half the population is worrying about what to do for Valentine’s Day. The other half don’t understand what all the fuss is about. It’s a difficult time, for romantics and cynics alike. The avalanche of red hearts, chocolates, sentimental cards, and expensive flowers that precede Valentine’s Day can turn your heart to mush or stone. Either way, the event itself is likely to be a disappointment. Unlike the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day rarely ends with a clear winner. It’s more like English cricket, which usually ends in a draw.
Valentine’s Day began in the 1800s as a special day for lovers and would-be lovers. Things were very intense back then, between women and men. You only have to read Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontё to appreciate the enormous importance attached to romance, love, sex, and marriage a hundred and fifty years ago.
The more things change, the more they remain the same – as the French might say if they had my gift for words. We still attach enormous importance to romance, love, and marriage. These themes dominate television soap operas, the pop music scene, and the huge romantic novel market. Love has never been so intensely promoted, nor has it been so difficult to identify in real life. The confusion of gender identities and gender ideologies creates paranoia in both sexes. Boy meets girl? Forget it.
Romantic love depended on suspense, distance and mystery. Long courtships were common, often carried on by letter, and sex was only a remote fantasy. Biographies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tell us that romantic couples would exchange literally hundreds of long letters when they were apart, not text messages. Now, the physical and psychological distance between women and men has vastly diminished - we are educated together, work together, and sometimes even fight together. there’s no remoteness, mystery, and little room for the romantic imagination.
But we don’t have problems with love just because of technology or changing social habits. We have problems because we don’t know what it is anymore. Not only do women and men define love in different ways, but everybody defines it in different ways. You will love our burgers, says the fast-food industry, and we are constantly invited to love cars, pop stars, smartphones, and floor wax, among many other things. The President, during his campaign, liked to open his arms and say, “We love you people.” So it’s clear that love in the twenty-first century takes some strange forms.
Because none of us can understand love now, if we ever did, it has mainly been replaced by the term “Relationship” (with a capital R). A Relationship can be just about any affair that lasts beyond a single night in a resort motel. A Relationship is more like a contract, which, in these delicate matters, is not at all a bad idea. It cuts through the fog and allows
you to ask straightforward questions. Is it is it enforceable? Is it fair? Do I lose or gain from it? Have we got a deal? Such questions rarely occur to the heroes and heroines of traditional love stories
Unfortunately, a relationship contract will never satisfy those who still long for romantic love. This old-fashioned, uncontrollable, eternal kind didn’t fizz out like a cheap firework on February 15 but lasted, if you were lucky, the entire year.
