jamesq | Valentine's Day Massacre

Today marks the last day of what an acquaintance terms Christmas-to-Valentine-Suicide-Season. The secret to surviving it when your alone is to avoid it. Dan Savage sums it up best:

It is a corporate exercise; it's also a holy day of romantic obligation. It's also a day of torment. Mother's Day is a torment if your mother is dead. Valentine's Day is a torment if you don't got one. And at some point in our lives, we will be tormented by Valentine's Day even if we're relatively lucky in love. It's just like Christmas. Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials. I find, though, that if you avoid TV, you don't succumb to the despair. I wouldn't say that holidays are manufactured by corporations, but they're certainly exploited and mined by them. If you're not a big consumer of television, I don't think it's too much of a torment even if you don't have a love interest.

For me, the season hasn't been particularly good, but it also hasn't been particularly bad. It's basically the same Valentine's Day I always have. I plan on spending the evening at the last of my five cooking classes. I'll be in the company of others, busy with manual tasks that don't require a lot of mental effort. Just what the doctor ordered.

Someday I will have a sweetie and she'd better watch out for the avalanche of gifts, chocolates, flowers, romantic-get-aways-for-two and candle-lit-dinners that this hopeless romantic has been saving up for years for. She'll die of insulin shock, but at least she'll die happy.

To all my friends who do have sweeties - ferkrisake do something to show your feelings for them - even if it's just a heartfelt "I love you".

You find somebody to love in this world
You'd better hang on tooth-and-nail.
The wolf is always at the door.
Don't take what you've got for granted.