A Less Romantic, But More Beautiful Way to Celebrate Valentine’s Day
Hearts and flowers are just icing on the cake
Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to demonstrate your love for your partner via a gift, card, and maybe dinner and flowers. And it all sounds rather wonderful. After all, who doesn’t enjoy a slap-up meal, champagne, and attention?
But beneath the shiny surface, the celebration of courtly love is often fraught with sweaty brows as individuals consider how to fulfill their loved one’s expectations.
What’s worse, the illusion of romantic love as ideal taints relationships and erodes what it generally means to create a successful union.
You have 24 hours to pretend your relationship’s rosy
Valentine’s takes the notion of romance to the extreme and plops it into a single day. You have 24 hours to make up for the preceding year’s flaws and indiscretions and show what an amazing partner you are.
Of course, we all know your year-round behavior matters far more than how many red roses you present to your beloved and whether you whisper sweet nothings in their ear on any particular day.
But the expectation to wrap your emotions in gilded paper and offer them to your spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend is hot on Valentine’s Day, and if you don’t, you’re likely to get into trouble.
Plenty of couples shower each other with genteel behavior and presents as anticipated, but don’t act lovingly when the day for romance has flown.
No one can blame them, though, because the pressure’s on to pretend everything’s rosy in Relationship Land and gloss over faults. Perhaps a more loving gesture would be to single out a day to reaffirm the intention to put up kindly with each other’s shortcomings and join together to generate mutual growth.
Why romance is a killer
Real relationships aren’t a skip through the meadow: They’re more like a journey through an assault course. You meet ups and downs, and sometimes you get dirty. Now and then there’s fun to be had, and it takes strength and stamina to continue. You face exhilaration and courage and increase resilience as you travel. Most importantly, your voyage makes you a better person because you learn and grow.
And that’s the whole point of a relationship, once children are no longer on the agenda. You may, or might not build a family via your partnership, and there’s more to your coupling than producing offspring. You are an intrinsic component in each other’s development.
You could be in the relationship for the long run. In which case, you make the commitment to travel with another person by your side, not only to stave off loneliness (although, they won’t always be able to do that for you anyway) but also because your partner assists your growth.
The romantic notions championed by Valentine’s Day, however, don’t include the potential for life-affirming obstacles on love’s highway. In fact, they set you up for problems. Because you imagine your beloved ought to understand your every wish and fear, you are bound to meet with disappointment.
At some point, many, no doubt, your partner will screw-up, and so will you because we are all flawed, complex beings with emotional baggage we unpack in our relationships.
Romantic idealism would have it couples are two halves of one whole. They communicate via telepathy of sorts and recognize each other’s needs without needing to be told.
Read any romantic novel, though — the likes of which you might gift wrap for your beloved on Valentine’s Day — and you’ll get the impression love is a far more shiny affair, filled with perfection and sunlight.
Author and philosopher Alain de Botton agrees romantic notions instill unrealistic concepts, and idealistic novels are partly to blame.
“The narrative arts of the Romantic novel have unwittingly constructed a devilish template of expectations of what relationships are supposed to be like — in the light of which our own love lives often look grievously and deeply unsatisfying. We break up or feel ourselves cursed in significant part because we are exposed to the wrong works of literature.”
Romantic love sets us up for failure
Just as we might compare our individual prowess with other people’s dexterity, we also compare our relationships. We use those on-screen and in print as examples of what love should be like.
Romantic movies rarely display couples who fight. Movies like that exist, but they are portrayed as representations of what happens when love’s missing rather than the demonstration of behaviors involved in enduring relationships.
And we often think the same about other people’s difficult relationships. We imagine couples aren’t really in love when we hear them complain and argue, and we conceive they’ve failed miserably. Of course, we judge our own relationships the same way as well when they show signs of imperfection.
Fairy-tales engender misconceptions about love too. They show couples when they first get together, while happy hormones hum like crazy and attraction rules, and tell us Prince Charming and his beloved live happily ever after.
A more realistic description might suggest couples share a life fraught with challenges and delights in equal measure rather than pretending they never get fed-up with each other.
In the real world, partners sometimes disagree, fail to understand each other, and unwittingly cause grievances now and then. They recognize each other’s flaws and point them out. When these flaws are highlighted lovingly, there’s a good chance growth is stimulated. When executed without dexterity, though, criticisms cause suffering.
A more beautiful way to celebrate Valentine’s Day
A loving gesture would be to single out a day to reaffirm the intention to put up with each other’s shortcomings kindly and join together to generate mutual growth.
You can have fun with romantic adventures. Enjoy a terrific dinner and pop the champagne cork. But make the day about recalling what love is rather than making it about what love is not.
Ditch the notion your partner should meet your every need and can extract it from you by mind-reading. Vow to communicate rather than sulk when they misunderstand you, forget something important to you, or don’t measure up in another way. Give them the chance to succeed.
By all means, whisper words of love. But remember, love has nothing to do with the way your partner’s hair shines in the moonlight or your willingness to sail the oceans for them.
Indeed, instead of flattery and false promises, it might be better to say something along the lines of:
I know we upset each other at times, and this obstacle course is often rough, but my willingness to take the journey with you shows I want to love you and intend to do my best by you. My heart fills with excitement knowing you are by my side and want to take this journey too. Thank you for all you do for me, and I can’t wait to meet the challenges that are part of our adventure.
Valentine’s Day cards rarely contain such realistic offerings because the companies that produce them intend to sell you a dream. The dream is a romantic notion that sullies real love and swaps it with an artificial version of affection that’s impossible to follow.
The truth be told, if you keep a realistic notion of love in mind, communicate well about each other’s needs and expectations, and don’t flee the course just because you scrape your knees, you could enjoy a wonderful, long-lasting relationship that’s far more special than any make-believe romantic ideal.
Copyright © 2020 Bridget Webber. All rights reserved