Valentine’s Day is here, with all the usual reminders of this divisive holiday, from tacky paper decorations to heart-shaped pieces of chalk stamped with saccharine messages that we, for some reason, pretend are candy every February 14th. If you’re single, it often feels like a manufactured Hallmark holiday, a brutal corporate reminder of your own loneliness. For the seemingly happy couples reveling in this most exclusive of holidays, however, it should carry an even starker reminder: One Valentine’s Day, your current cutie pie is going to be decaying in a box in the dirt – if you don’t get there first.
That’s right – assuming you don’t break up, get cheated on, or get left for someone with more money and talent. You might get married in a desperate attempt to prove you deserve happiness, only to find yourselves in court three years later, fighting over visitation rights for the Lesser Antillean macaw you never wanted in the first place. Or you might just stay together because it’s safe and familiar and easy, even after you realize it was never love. You’ll slowly watch the stars go out of their eyes until all you can see is the way they smack their lips when they speak. Eventually, you flee, searching for passion in the arms of an unending series of faceless, nameless lovers, until finally you forget it all at the bottom of a box of cheap wine every night. Even if you do grow old together, like we’ve all been told we will, one of you will outlive the other. One of you will be left alone, to drudge drearily through the last ten years of your life, watching your friends die, one after the other, until all the funerals start to blur together. You’ll gripe vaguely about the young people and the way they’re ruining the government these days, and wish the kids would call, but that only reminds you that no one really needs you anymore. Old people are nothing but a historical curiosity, supposedly full of wisdom and interesting stories no one actually cares about, only visited out of obligation by grandchildren who are slightly afraid to touch them. They hang on to life for no other reason but habit, knowing the world is going by outside their window but too tired and too disinterested to get up and look. Eventually, that love of your life will fall asleep while looking past a Brewers game playing on TV, and no one will find them until the neighbors notice the smell.
So, by all means, take your love out to dinner or give them flowers this Wednesday; I’m sure they’ll appreciate it. But remember, no matter how happy you think you are now: We all die alone.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
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