Valentine's Day is Dumb

For Amy, Unapologetically

Two peas in a pod? We are the pod.

Here’s an even cornier analogy for you: You are an essential element in the periodic table of my life.

There is no functional version of “me” without “you,” is what I am saying.

I say this knowing that we both possess the standard-issue aloneness that gets doled out to every human soul—that no matter how fully either of us inhabits “us,” we’ll both eventually reassume our solitary “I.”

First, though, our bones will lose density, our muscles will lose mass, our minds, well, you know.

Loss is the rule from here on out.

When the blows come—and they will—our closeness will be the only thing that keeps us from buckling altogether.

But “closeness” isn’t quite the right word. What I really mean is intimacy. It comes from the Latin intimus, the superlative of intus, meaning “within” or “inside.”

Intimacy goes beyond closeness. It involves a crossing over. Things getting all tangled up together. This impossible to tell apart from that. Can’t undo it without doing some real damage.

Such intimacy isn’t an automatic outcome of marriage. It has to be cultivated. Worked at and cared for.

This requires attention—a very intent sort of it. The kind where the pupils dilate and goosebumps might even happen.

Mostly, though, goosebumps won’t happen. The kind of attention I’m talking about is unhurried, unsexy, and effortful.

It is also a give-and-take thing. You can’t just give it. You also have to be open to it, to not recoil from it. To accept the gift.

Did I say that Valentine’s Day is dumb?

It is. Not because it’s a Hallmark holiday. But because it encourages the idea that a compulsory once-a-year gesture is a meaningful measure of love. That after the flowers have been delivered, one can breathe easy until Mother’s Day. That one can, if he wants, stop paying attention.

I don’t want that.

I want you to be able to unearth undiscovered parts of yourself and share them with me without fear of judgment or, worse, indifference. And I want you to be the one to whom I say the things that it’s hardest for me to think, let alone say.

We are always changing. Real intimacy helps us know who we are becoming. It even contributes to the process.

All of this occurs within the locus of “us.” It stays that way until one of us is called inward to that place where no plurality is allowed—where the original “I” dissolves into something unsayable and unknowable.

Thirty-six years ago on Valentine’s Day, the Voyager 1 space probe took the famous Pale Blue Dot picture you see at the top of this post. It’s often invoked to remind us of our cosmic insignificance. We are invited to look at Earth, a solitary pixel of blue in a vast and indifferent universe, and reflect on how small we are.

But when I look at that picture, I don’t see a gnat-sized rock engulfed in brutal darkness. I don’t feel crushing isolation. I feel something different. I can’t put it into words. But it has a lot—everything—to do with you.