I’ll bypass the suggestions that Valentine’s Day is an imported custom, a Catholic Saint, and so forth. We’ve understood that.
However, in our pop culture consciousness, it has been established as the celebration of love.
Let’s go deeper. With two marriages under my belt, I won’t even pretend to be an expert on matters of the heart.
But if I count the childhood, teenage, and other loves that have marked my life, I believe I’ve earned the right to express an opinion.
My heart first fluttered for a girl when I was just six years old. That newfound feeling was enough to make me fall in love with love itself. For several years, I tried again and again to replicate it, sometimes successfully and sometimes with crushing failure.
A teenage relationship that lasted four years was perhaps the first one that impacted me more than any other, in the sense that I kept trying to relive that first moment when I saw her in the schoolyard and I lost my breath.
My mother thought I was sick. “What’s wrong, my child?” I would leave school at noon and sit idle for hours staring at the ceiling. Can you blame her?
Her loss, along with other breakups that would follow, would scar my soul forever. I still carry the marks, not as wounds, but as life teachers, and guides, that matured me – at least in that aspect – and taught me to show love and respect for partners, especially, and friends in general.
But addiction to love hides serious risks. Men or women addicted to that first heartbeat, seeking it again and again, end up moving from relationship to relationship, leaving behind wreckage: hurt hearts, broken people, and bleeding wounds.
They always want what they don’t have, and when they conquer it, they’ve already moved on to the next embrace.
I didn’t reach that point, nor will I deny that I haven’t hurt – perhaps irreparably – people who, if they’re reading me now (to those I haven’t apologised to in person): I’m sorry.
For those who won’t go out tonight on some romantic outing, I suggest to binge-watch the Netflix series “One Day,” an English gem for the parallel journey of two young people, which at times intersects at critical points in their lives and at other times is marked by the painful separation of one from the other until their adulthood.
The cool white rich guy and the humble Indian intellectual, on a journey scattered with rose petals, pain, tearing apart, missed opportunities, and many, many life lessons.
At some point, the poor, yet honest girl, somewhere at the beginning of the journey, says to her co-protagonist, “I don’t want to end up a footnote on your journey.”
That’s it. Never view your romantic or other relationships as footnotes or asterisks. But as milestones of maturity and growth. You should be grateful.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
