Merry Valentine’s Day, by Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture

February 11, 2010 Whitney Farmer 4 Comments

My family started a new tradition this last Christmas.  We all gathered together while a sister read us all a letter.  This letter was submitted by another sister, and it was one that had arrived for her just in time for the holidays in her email.  It had come from an ex-boyfriend, and not just any ex-boyfriend.  He was one of those escape-from-in-the-middle-of-the-night monsters.  This dangerous man had decided that he was going to give himself a Christmas present of trying to break my sister’s spirit.  He started his diatribe by saying that it was his moral obligation to tell her what an awful person she was to have escaped his terrorizing.

This was one of the best gifts ever:  It was like he had thrown raw meat to us. The letter was read aloud by another sister who has a gift for sarcastic imitations, in the presence of three generations who love each other, while the sister who had escaped was enfolded in the arms of her HOT brilliant successful younger new husband.  All of us took turns making fun of the terrorist and talking about the things that we hated about him.  Just like “Bad Santa”, Bad Loves now have a place in our family.

Once upon a long time ago, I was married for a long time.  Since then I have had boyfriends who were worthy of some chuckles.  One lost interest after I beat him at target shooting. One had eyeliner I could borrow. One played an alien on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

There were the other ones, too. But that’s okay.

Valentine the Saint is a bit of a mystery.  To begin, there is more than one recorded in antiquity. There are three that might be candidates for being the namesake for a holiday dedicated to love.  The only thing that they have in common is that they were all martyred.

But that’s okay, too.

The most likely prospect lived in Rome during the time when tickets to the Coliseum were being scalped for a premium.  He married two Christians in secret which was forbidden because Claudius II wanted men single in order to be more effective in war. Valentine was brought before Caesar. Claudius II tried to persuade him out of his beliefs, so Valentine returned the favor. And – as in love – he lost his head over it. I read in one source that Valentine wrote a letter of love the last night of his life and signed it, “From your Valentine.” But this history was probably penned by some scholar with the last name “Hallmark”.

The tradition of Valentine’s Day seems to have been invented by Chaucer in the Middle Ages but has no significant legacy attached to it.  There is some speculation that it superimposes a celebration of the marriage of Hera and Zeus. But no one would suggest that the myths surrounding their devotion would be worthy of dedication.  It seems that we celebrate Valentine’s Day not because it makes sense or there is an historical precedent or a worthy legacy, but perhaps for the only perfect reason.

We celebrate because we want to.  We try to justify the sense of it, like we do love, but it doesn’t work.

Once upon a time, I also had one of those scary boyfriends.  Today, I was digging through my makeup drawer and found a dried up bottle of fingernail polish.  My personal terrorist once tried to apologize to me for something he had done by painting my nails at a Denny’s in the middle of the night when I agreed to meet him.  The breakup still stuck, but I somehow ended up with the bottle of polish.  I put it on tonight – lumpy but still a great color – and wrote this column while it dried.  The question isn’t ‘Why?’, but ‘Why not?’.  It’s the same with Valentine’s Day, and also with love.

Why not celebrate?  Why not believe? “…What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god…” Bill Shakespeare. Quote of the Blog.

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Whitney runs a rock music venue in L.A. She has an M.B.A. and no one cares.