Valentine's Day Cynic

I was born on Valentine’s Day.  Throughout the years I’ve found it to be a curse.  Teased as a child.  Expected to magically be exceptionally romantic as if The Muses came to my crib with a love potent.  When asked for my birth date, always the comment: “oh, you’re a Valentine’s Baby”.  No, a Valentine’s Day Cynic I’ve become.  Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark Holiday where the crime of love’s “un-truths” is perpetrated.  It’s the one day of the year that we are reminded to believe something that is only partially true. 

The un-truth is the propagation of a widely accepted falsehood: the idea that love is self-less.  We are taught early on that love is self-sacrifice. And if love is a self-interest endeavor, it becomes covetous. This intuitively makes sense.  However, is love really a charitable state?

Here’s a Valentine’s card.  “I don’t really care to be in your life.  I get no personal joy or value from your looks, fashion, how you act or your view on life.  I get no profit from being in a relationship with you.  No satisfaction emotionally, intellectually or intimately.  I pity you.  All my love.  Happy Valentine’s Day.”

Are we loved for what we lack rather than anything positive offered?  I’m reminded of a beggar in the city. With pitiful love I nobly drop him some change all the while thinking: “Someone should do something about these homeless”.  This view of love is inherent in the belief that love is self-sacrificial.

Real, genuine and true love includes the opposite.  It is a “selfish-spectrum” of behavior.  It is beneficial to your life without involving a sacrifice of another to you or others.  (“It really feels good to do something for someone else”).

It is selfish to love someone because you value that particular person, because the person somehow improves your life and adds an intense source of joy to it.  After all, is it possible to be indifferent to something of value to you?  The effort, time, material goods and focus you spend on behalf of a loved one do not constitute sacrifices.  They are actions taken to ensure the other’s happiness which is of paramount importance to your own.  Vernacular expressions: “He’s kind and considerate and takes good care of me.” “She’s everything to me.” “What do you want in a woman / man?”

Actions of such, done for a stranger or your enemy might be considered sacrifices.  Self-denial implies a belief it is indifferent whether the one you love is healthy, sick, happy, depressed, dead or living.

We are taught love is unconditional.  “Love one another as a brother or sister.” Unconditional love is propagated in the “Hate the sin, love the sinner” dictum.  Standing in front of The Ground Zero Memorial last month, I wondered if that dictum was really true. Would it have made sense to hate the destruction and perpetrators of 911, and then on Valentine’s Day, 2002 send Ben Laden a box of chocolates and a Captain America Valentine’s Day card?  Love when applied this way is rather noble, don’t you think?

Love is far too sacred to be handed out indiscriminately.  Love is the highest exchange of human existence.  It is a spiritual interchange and symbiotic relationship between people for the purpose of mutual benefit.  Mutual value drives a love for one another. 

The highest value of this experience is thus manifested in the experience that love ought to be given unconditionally to you.  You are no more of value than anyone else, and yet worthy of receiving love.  You receive it in spite of anything you do…a causeless gift.

For those who seek to experience love, the demands are challenging.  You have to see yourself as worthy of receiving love.  Otherwise you will not be able to participate in its dance.  Rand wrote in The Fountainhead: “To say ‘I love you,’ one must know first how to say the ‘I”.

This Valentine’s Day enjoy the material expressions of love’s spiritual value – chocolates, cards, and romantic diners.  Ignore life’s frivolousness.  There is plenty of time for that tomorrow.  Enjoy the peace of being worthy of another’s love, and of having found someone who feels the same. 

And if this essay is too cynical for you…well, I WAS born on Valentine’s Day.