Guest post by Lynn Hale.
How I Learned to Stop Wearing Black and Love the V-Day: A Perennially Single Gal’s Perspective
We all know how it starts.
First, the dreaded heart-covered wrapping paper blooms overnight, like an overzealous weed, the minute you manage to sweep the last pine needles off the living room floor.
Then, it’s the grocery stores. Flashy bows, cloyingly cute little teddy bears, and pink/purple/red-dressed boxes of chocolate taunt you mercilessly as you attempt to make your weekly rounds in peace.
Next, the advertising companies pull out all the stops with rings and necklaces and watches and cruises and cars and other not-so-subtle reminders of expectations and other people’s standards.
By the time February actually arrives, everything from movies and TV shows to local restaurants and your mother has caught the fever. Valentine’s Day is back, with a vengeance.
It’s not easy being a single girl (or guy) in the midst of all of this couple-worship. Yet, for the majority of Valentine’s Days when it mattered (since about age fourteen or so) in my twenty-odd year life, I have been single. “Let’s wear black, to protest,” quipped one of my friends during a cafeteria conversation in the days of “secret admirer” roses showing up in homeroom and who’s asking whom to the semi-formal. “Who needs that commercialized crap anyway?”
For years, I did just that, though figuratively—I never actually wore black. In my weaker moments, I tried to fight back tears as I saw the excitement in others’ eyes as a surprise bouquet of roses appeared on a workmate’s desk or happy couples holding hands at the film screenings I attended to keep my mind off being “alone, so aloooone”. I grimaced when Facebook statuses changed from “In a Relationship” to “Engaged” and a billion congratulations flooded my “News” page. I grumbled when everyone and everything had to have a “love” theme for an entire month, a particular slight in light of my birthday occurring within a week of this annual shmoop-fest.
But, for the past couple of years, things have been different. For one, my definition of love has changed immensely as I’ve grown as a Catholic woman. I now know that the deepest, most invigorating relationship that I can have in the universe is with the One who created me… and that the very best is yet to come.
I no longer look for merely a boyfriend, but discern a vocation to marriage, which, if I am indeed called to live out is an entirely different journey from the ones that our culture so often churns out as romance — the ones that conveniently wrap up once the couple gets together. Rather than seeing myself as someone without love, which I did for years, I now see that I have all of the Love that I could ever need, here and now.
I’ll admit that it still hurts sometimes. I want to be able to give and share more than ever and there is simply no substitute for that gift of self that one makes in a marriage. But, even as a single person, we are not limited in our experience of sharing and kindness. And, as honest married couples will tell you, longing and waiting do not end with a walk down the aisle. Eternal completeness simply doesn’t come in this lifetime.
So, what to make of all of the hearts and candy and poetry? Well, there is still beauty in artistic expression and the idea of love in a cultural sense. So, when February comes around and romance is inescapable, I embrace it. I smile at the cards and flowers, watch the movies, soak in the poetry, and proudly wear red when the day finally comes (the color of the Holy Spirit, after all). I see it as a way of taking a moment to acknowledge the beauty and wonder of relationships in general. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with celebrating love without a beloved, especially when one knows that he or she is Loved beyond measure.
So, go ahead, my dear fellow singles — this day is for you, too. Read about St. Valentine, go to Mass and/or Adoration, curl up with the Song of Songs and enjoy some of the festivities that your town has to offer. Because, once the flowers have dried and the candy gone stale, all of us still have Spring to look forward to.
And that’s worth celebrating.
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Lynn Hale is a writer, teacher, and recent convert to the Catholic Church. She currently lives in Texas.
2 thoughts on “Love the V-Day”
Ha ha. When I was a teenager I despised Valentine’s Day, with a deep contempt bordering on nausea. Nowadays, in my mid twenties, I pretty much ignore it. I too have always been single on that day, but the day has never seemed to me to make that fact more disappointing. I think that is for two reasons: First, I have been single for a long time by choice. I had other things to do. And Secondly, the Valentine’s day romance seems totally unromantic to me. It all seems so… public? Garish? Commercialized? Cultural coercion for men to “be romantic” once a year, is about as meaningful to me as using Christmas as cultural coercion to “be generous” once a year. It’s better than never being generous or romantic at all, but hardly the real virtue of generosity or romance. (Yes, romance is a virtue.)
Romance is such a real thing, and Valentine’s day just reeks of fakeness. The guys at work complain about how they still haven’t gotten anything for their wives and they’d better get on that or they’ll be spending the next week in the dog house. Commercials are so saccharine, full of maudlin sentimentality. I don’t see love in the air. I see dollar signs.
Your post got me thinking that here ought to be a way to do St. Valentine’s day well. It would be a very good thing to celebrate real love once a year, maybe volunteering with Missionaries of Charity or something. Doing something to celebrate Catholic marriage week. Inviting friends over for pizza. Your suggestion of Adoration and reading the Song of Songs is a great idea. You are right, we are celebrating something that will last, not just our whole lives, but even through eternity. Worth being happy about.
Dear girl, how I wish I’d had your wisdom and guts at your age. My single V-days (in the Boogie Nights 70s and pre-AIDs 80s NYC, when “romance” meant hooking up before they invented the term) were excruciating, and in a pre-Internet age I felt like a dodo-bird/freak for not giving up and going along. (These days it’s easier for us romantic dodos to find and support one another in the Good Fight.) If I could have blown up those cheesy red hearts with my eyeballs, I would have. Yet I realize now that the years of Always Alone were probably given to me by a wiser power who knew what I wasn’t ready for–and the real deal arrived in his own good time. Wishing you a month filled with richness and love.