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Everyone is aware that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, the international day of despair that one is not loved enough, of guilt that women feel in their expectations of being wined, dined and – well, you can fill in the last. It is a day of imposition, running around during lunch hours to find a suitable gift, ordering flowers or balloons or chocolate-dipped strawberries. It is the day on which I realized, in about seventh grade, what friendship in adulthood is. I walked into my classroom with my bag of 24 cards (“Bee Mine,” “Police be my valentine,” “You’re tea-rific, valentine”) to find one or two cards on my desk and, scattered around the room, small heart-shaped boxes of chocolates.
I went to a parish parochial school. Our classes were so small, and reached so far back, that I’d never considered myself unpopular. There were a few misfits but they were so far beyond the pale that everyone else was just…everyone else.
Until Valentine’s Day. In the time it takes to turn your head, I had become not-so-popular and raggedly immature.
As the girls discovered their booty, I saw that they had given each other the boxes. Sheltered and “good,” having a boyfriend in those days was in name only. At least I had that relief.
And my father would give me chocolates that night, coveted as much for the red velvet or fake sateen as for the bedroom yum-factor. He would give me a heart and I would hope it meant he gave me his heart.
Let me say it for the record: I hate Valentine’s Day. I also love Valentine’s Day. I love the many reds of the heart-shaped boxes. I love the memory of picking out my box of cards at the Rexall Drug Store on Orange Street. I love the memory of those tasteless candy hearts my brothers and I exchanged. But my love is unsated. I need to be given rosewood velvet or cherry cardboard Whitman’s. Buying them for myself would be a lie I couldn’t, quite, live with.
Fortunately, it is one day among 27 in National Heart Month, National Black History Month, National Creative Love Month, National An Affair to Remember Month, and as overwhelming as these remembrances are (it’s also one day in International Flirting Week, International Friendship Week, National Condom Week and the end of National Dump Your Significant Jerk Week). There other days dedicated to much more complicated stuff.
Today, on the eve of St. Valentine of Terni’s martyrdom 1700 years ago – for trying to convert Emperor Claudius, not for some Abelard and Eloise grand romance – is International Self Love Day.
When I learned this last week, I got a little obsessed with the idea. First I pondered its global implications. Do the women of Eritrea or Aleppo know about this? Isn’t self-love a kind of a luxury problem? Or is the determination to survive, possibly to emigrate to safety and First World problems like racial rejection and self-affirmations (“Wanting to be somebody else,” Marilyn Monroe says, “is a waste of the person you are” – and who would know better about self-waste?), the ultimate act self-love?
And what the hell is self-love, anyway? (Is it significant that I keep typing “love” as “lobe”?) The first pages of Google Images has only five men, including Buddha with a quote. We get a bunch of stock images for every good thought, that of women throwing their arms in the air in ecstasy, often in front of a dramatic sunset. There are images of women hugging themselves or holding their hands over their chests, butterflies and hearts and floaty bedrooms galore. They are pointless. I would not use one for this essay unless it was ironic.
Other online sources are more concrete. One site suggests self-indulgence: buying oneself flowers, taking a bubble bath, having lobster instead of chicken, reading with a big mug of green tea. These are pleasures. At most they are offerings on the altar of self. But they aren’t self-love. Another blog gives a list of advice: don’t compare yourself to others, be your own best friend, ask for love when you can’t muster it up for yourself. Neither are these pointers self-love. They are self-respect, acceptance and, when all else fails, reliance. When I Google “self-love affirmations” I come up with a weird pity party of letting go of negative self-talk, assuming the mantel of one’s power, feeling deservingness.
These are all good enough rules, but they are rules for clearing the clutter of feeling bad about one’s self.
So let’s turn to love feels in it’s external state. As anyone who has attended a wedding knows, when it comes love, 1 Corinthians is the literal bible of how it works:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs… It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
The context of these verses is that if one sacrifices everything for good but does it without love, one is nothing. Love makes us something. Love brings us from non-matter to matter, and perhaps by extension, into mattering.
Love, according to Paul, is the antithesis of greed, wrath, envy, and pride, leaving modern self-affirmations to tackle lust, gluttony, and sloth in rounding out the avoidance of the theological Seven Deadly Sins, along with post-industrial sins like depression, self-harm and voting for Trump.
Paul wrote this letter to address what he saw as Corinth’s heretical version of Christianity. Isn’t that keeping a record of wrongs, assuming he knows best what their practice of Christianity is, seeking to keep the city in line with his views?
We like the part about patience and kindness. They are doable. But boasting, pride, transgression, self-promotion, keeping score? These are the things that remind us of the something we are – talented, successful, pleased with ourselves, safe. They are fun and essential – gossip, psychologists now say, is actually helpful. At the very least, it makes up two-thirds of our conversation. Recording wrongs means I won’t be sniveling to people who have hurt me (you know who you are), or waiting for them to come to their senses. Trust and hope are all very well, but only when they are invested in people or things that have possibility.
Of all the Pauline attributes of love that is most useful on International Self Love Day is self-seeking, which the New American Bible translates as not seeking its own interests and the New English Bible uses the word selfish. (The King James Bible refers not to love but to charity, which puts a whole new spin on the chapter and should have been consulted in the making of several historical movies that come to mind.)
Seeking self – being something – is, in fact, an aspect of charity. We give to causes that speak to important aspects of ourselves. Ask someone what they open their wallets, closets and calendars for, and you’ll know a great deal about him.
Truly seeking self, truly seeking what interests us (an absorbing task in whatever manifestation it takes), diverts anger and envy. It is trusting and hopeful and patient. When a one finds one's truest talent in pottery or hedge fund management, one is invested in hope. Pne is, in the act itself, too febrile for all those Pauline faults and foolhardy self-affirmations. One is whole, in charge, purposeful, visionary. Seeking self or seeking interest requires perseverance because the something we are is a lesson in the better performance of the iteration of self we seek.
Which brings me back to Yana subsisting in Aleppo. She has two choices: curl up and starve to death, or do whatever it takes to nourish herself in order to take on the next challenge in a war zone. If she chooses the latter, she is something: a survivor whose best talents at the moment are tenacity, imagination, hope, a sharp eye for opportunity. Maybe she will get to Germany and begin throwing those beautiful pots again. But her somethingness – all of our somethingnesses that are a part from tomorrow's festival of romantic love
– is manifested in all those ways Paul tells us love shows itself.
February 15th, by the way is Singles Awareness Day. What a world! If awareness passes into action, we’re happy to get the clearance Valentine stuff. No chocolate-covered cherries, please.
