As I wait for the Britney doc to become available in Britain, my mind turns to love. Valentine’s Day is the gourmet ham of love itself, romance dialed up to eleven, every inanimate oblong morphing into a heart shape. It’s impossible to avoid the clichés, the great romances, the nuzzling couples.
We often think of ourselves as in love, or out of it, single or attached, but we all know there’s a fathomless space between. Things can get very binary, which is never a good thing. Love is a spectrum. It’s the time of year when you can feel smug or lonely, depending on your relationship status, fingering your own inadequacy. Are you a good enough partner, you might ask? Can you convert this part-time lover to an eternal one? Are you emotionally ready for a stranger to see you naked?
Valentine’s Day makes everything worse, and compounds guilt for the coupled—of being too clingy, or too distant, or of not giving your partner enough of your time. After the first vaccination from Cupid’s arrow, there’s an assumption that a relationship feels like Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s sofa, but the main thrust of long term love is jointly deciding what’s for dinner and strategically timing your farts. Obviously, that paradigm has its own luster (it’s not becoming to whinge your way through a partnership especially in a time of peaking isolation and loneliness), but persons of conscious coupledom, struggling through the shared domesticity of lockdown, can be forgiven for not desperately clawing at each other between existential sobs.
For singles in this time of global disconnect, of our current hug-less existence, the constant reminder of time passing is magnified. It’s worth fully acknowledging the pressure put on women to couple and mate and bear children before the clock strikes midnight on 34, and Valentine’s can serve as a long-lead reminder of eventual biological decay. Certain apps deliver a conveyor belt of bachelors, regardless of their eligibility. But these bachelors, on the whole, seem less preoccupied with procreation, safe in the knowledge they’ll be ejaculating all the way into their 70s.
I’m all for Galentine’s and Best Friendmas, for something, anything, to take the edge off. Perhaps this will help? As we enter this year’s sweetheart solstice, unexercised and unwaxed, remember you’re enough. Being single isn’t something to fix. It’s not a lacking state. You are still worthy of love, still lovable, whether or not you have a fawning partner. Sorry for the pep talk, but we’re inundated with sly and insidious conditioning to the contrary, fiction that tells us love is the goal: see every romcom ever, the Sex and the City back catalogue, Jane Austen, Euphoria.
While you’re scrolling the airbrushed affairs, it’s worth remembering that real love isn’t hearts or flowers. The beginning is thrilling, sure, but you get less giddy as the newness of new love dissipates. If you don’t fall out of love (that does happen) it matures like a decent cheddar with veins of shared history and Valentine’s is the day you’re forcibly required to shun distraction and focus on your partner. Real love tends to feel like a good friendship rather than red hot passion; it fits like a familiar t-shirt. (Okay, that might not make you feel better if you’re single.)
I’ve been in love a handful of times and, though I recommend it, it’s not not work. You have to make time to be present, which sounds so, so simple, and is one of the trickiest things to accomplish long-term. Love is a mesh of human vulnerability that’s uncomfortably exposing and at times excruciating. And it’s worth it. Just about.
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