valentine's day rant

The other day I was at the drugstore and I saw those cute little boxes of old- fashioned valentine’s day candies …you know… the little pastel hearts with the messages ‘sweet talk, darling, charm me, love story,’ etc.

I sat for awhile and remembered what it felt like to exchange those earnest little candies with the other boys and girls way back when...

I remembered the high drama that was created around the giving
and receiving of those little tokens of ‘love’.
Our cherished hopes, our vulnerable little hearts wide open,
the unbearable pain or high exhilaration of seeing who picked who.

The hurt and dashed hopes when our ‘true love’ picked another…
or when we, the sincere, were elbowed aside
by the more aggressive game players…you know…the ones
who stole hearts for sport and broke them with ease.

We were trained early on to hang our entire future happiness
on the hope that some fine day we would be loved, we would get married,
hold a baby and all that went with that.

They acted like that was the only game in town…

Well, it wasn’t...
but we were not supposed to know that or to figure it out for ourselves.

We were herded in that direction all the way from the crib
to the schoolyard and into adulthood.
For some strange and sinister reason our society demands that
we must all suffer this experience, suited to it or not.


I, for one, didn’t really want to do any of that...
It just didn’t attract, much less excite me.
It seemed rather boring and simple-minded. It moved way too slow for me.

It was like ending life just as you were embarking upon it!
I would much rather discover the world...experience more...
experience everything!

It surely didn’t seem like ‘the big prize’ they made it out to be...
Not compared to being free ...to grow, to travel and learn
or figure out how to make the world a better place.

But in our society ‘nobody gets out alive’...rather cult-like...
unless you're willing to make quite a nuisance of yourself and
disappoint all kinds of folks. And then there is the unfortunate
business of the silly labels they might assign to you because
you are a little bit different.

Not to mention that it was easy to see that most of us would
be left holding the diaper bags alone in the end.

We would go on to experience betrayal, fury, and decades of pain
followed by our own foolish remake of the same dumb scenario
with the next ‘mister right’.

Never waking from the trance.

Never getting to do what we really wanted to do with our lives
and our gifts and our time.
Never daring to really see that these sacrificial lives we led
were not sacrificed for any higher purpose,
but were sacrificed in service to a stultifying, mind-numbing
societal expectation that clearly was not working.

There is a natural enmity between women who have followed
the well trodden path of romance and marriage and those that have,
at some point, extricated themselves from the snare
and have dared to live their lives according to the dictates
of their own souls and minds.

Sympathy is offered in a most unsympathetic way...
‘Oh, poor dear...you never married.’
‘So sad! You never had children,’ they intone so cloyingly.

They are eager to let you know what lower rung of society you belong to.
You must be somehow inferior or damaged goods. No one ‘picked’ you.

The truth of the matter, however, is that they shield themselves
carefully from seeing too clearly or feeling too honestly
that their lives are painfully, sometimes horribly, off the mark.
They find that they are caught in a demoralizing trap…
as one woman puts it...’The dance of death’.
Their energies are spent in propping up their illusions
until one of them dies an early and/or unhappy death.
But they are already dying on the inside.

They lack the will, the support or the energy to escape their
unhappy arrangements and take another go at life.
What follows is a very long and deadening trek to the end of life.
One must entertain oneself along the way as best one can
and hope for a few spoils at the last.
Everyone loses and few gain in the end....

Then they dutifully shepherd the next generation into the same trap
hoping that they will do better...that they will get it right. aieeee!

Don’t cry for me on Valentine’s Day.
I have been mercifully spared the aggravation of keeping up the pretense
of being happily married, when in reality one might be shackled
in a ‘till death do us part’ arrangement.

I am spared the thousands of rationalizations that go into keeping on
keeping on.
I am relieved of the endless routine and terrible boredom
that comes from living a trivial and self-limiting life.

Life for me is sweet, simple, authentic and relaxed.
I am content with myself and in love with life wherever it leads.

And, for your information, we are not loveless...

We are free to experience love in its myriad forms, faces, and places.
Love as it is… free and spontaneous and large.
Love that is not bent and pounded into holes that do not fit
for the whole of our lives.

In the end, we have been misled… about love and happiness and
how it all works.

We have been programmed from outside ourselves to live according
to patterns determined by others who took the path of least resistance
to their misery…and many times, our own.


That said, I champion real love wherever it is found...even if it is not 'shared'.
It is genuine. It is what we are...
Don't be afraid to drink from your own beautiful cup...

Each love has a purpose, a season, a medicine, much learning...
I believe that you never have to stop loving anyone that you ever loved.
Never discard, tear up or disdain love, even if it didn't work out
like you thought it should...

Go back, see it in a new light...in the private light of your own heart
and not the dim light of the over culture.

Weep a little, take to yourself some of the sweetness and fun that it was...

Keep your hearts open...say a prayer of forgiveness for mistakes made.

'I forgive you, I release you and I bless you... finally... Be Glad...