Last February 14, “Ask Matt Labash” dissented from Valentine’s Day. One year later, the editorial staff submitted a question (under the name “All Out of Love”) asking if he felt any different now. His response, written with his characteristic flourish, was, “No.”
Here THE WEEKLY STANDARD presents the 2017 classic “Valentine’s Day: A Dissent” in its unaltered form.
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Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
What do you think about Valentine’s Day?
Cheers,
Amanda
Like most American males, I try not to think about Valentine’s Day. At least not until it’s on me, like a tax deadline or microvascular angina—unpleasant realities that can only be ignored for so long before the failure to reckon with them could result in imprisonment or death.
For I am one of those Romeos you see at the long line at the Hallmark’n’flower counter on the morning of February 14, unless I really planned ahead and went out around 10 pm on February 13. I see my fellow sufferers all around me. Shame-faced husbands and boyfriends wearing the haunted eyes of the hunted, hoping against hope that they don’t bump into their special lady friend buying pumpkin-spiced something-or-another at the grocery-store Starbucks, where their calloused Last-Minute-Larry disregard for their fairer yoga-pants-wearing sugarplums will be laid bare.
On the other hand, Valentine’s Day is a marketing sham. I play along with it just to stay married and/or be a dutiful capitalist. I may be a nihilist at heart, but I don’t want us to end up like North Korea. Hollow commerce-based rituals matter. They’re what separate us from the animals and Communists. Though I think by now, the cat’s out of the bag that Valentine’s Day is a “holiday” (one from which you never get the day off) meant to induce guilt under the guise of coerced affection. All so that some greeting card hack who didn’t have the chops to make it in advertising or romance-novel writing can stay gainfully employed. Which is to say nothing of the rose growers of America, Edible Arrangements peddlers, and battery-operated sex-toy manufacturers who are also the suckerfish of this Most Joyous Occasion ®. (Americans spent 19.7 billion dollars on Valentine’s Day last year, at least three-quarters of whom, I suspect, were paying for the privilege of pitching woo to women they’ve already won over.)
Even Valentine’s Day’s historical provenance is a murky backwater of bloodshed and pointlessness. According to the invaluable scholars at history.com, NPR, infoplease.com, and Wikipedia (basically, the first four sites that came up in my Google search), it may or may not have derived from one of three different Christian saints with some variation of the name of St. Valentine, all of whom ended up martyred, and one of whom’s flowered-crowned skull is on exhibit in a Rome basilica. (A perfect metaphor for what happens if you forget to “celebrate” Valentine’s Day.)
Other accounts have it that Valentine’s Day descended from the pagan feast of Lupercalia, in which men sacrificed both a goat and a dog, then went around walloping women with the bloodied hides of the animals they’d just smote, in the interest of promoting fertility. (In-vitro fertilization, then, was just a distant dream.) Some tales have it that Valentine’s Day was first associated with romantic love in the 1382 Chaucer poem, “Parlement of Foules”:
In spite of Chaucer’s iffy Middle English spelling skills, the holiday took, with all its attendant benefits: high suicide rates due to loneliness, unrepentant blackmailing (53 percent of women say they would end a relationship if they didn’t receive something on Valentine’s Day), and other desperate, scary statistics (14 percent of women send themselves flowers on Valentine’s Day).
I personally celebrate Valentine’s Day in my own peculiar way. Sure, I’ve gone all out for my wife before. I’ve bought her music boxes and jewelry, have wined and dined her, and have taken her for a weekend getaway, where we only have to listen to 10 to 12 hours of sales pitches on a condo timeshare before we can get down to the real business of turning our comp’d hotel room into Cupid’s Gym. Her being a good Maryland girl, she loves crustaceans. But seeing as how Valentine’s Day falls in February—way out of blue-crab season—one year, I even bought her a shrimp platter, when the Feb. 14 line at the Giant flower stand was too long. (The seafood department line was much shorter.) She was pretty happy with it, until she opened the plastic lid, and it smelled about two days past due. She gamely tried to eat one or two anyway, before feeling sick. (Love is about compromise.)
But I’ve settled down with the grand gestures, in middle age. After all, we’ve been married for 22 years. And after enough Valentine’s Days go by, what do you get the girl who already has everything: a strong yet sensitive lover, two children in my own likeness, and a really comprehensive cable package? There’s just not that much novelty left to explore, unless I hand her a custom-made riding crop, asking her to whip me until I offer up our safe word. (“Shrimp platter.”)
So on most Valentine’s Days, I just do this: I drive down to my local drugstore, and look for the “Mahogany” section of the Hallmark greeting cards, the African-American themed cards, somewhat racist-ly named. I am not African-American, nor is my wife. But I appreciate both their pageantry and directness. Their dynamism. If I was sending my wife a song for Valentine’s Day, I wouldn’t send her some white-bread mush-loaf like Engelbert Humperdinck’s version of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You“. No, I’d send her something more beautiful and dangerous, like Wilson Pickett’s “I’m In Love“, the first 40 seconds of which qualify as foreplay under most state laws.
I am sure, right about now, some Assistant Editor of Outrage at Slate is about to fire off 1,000 words of canned denunciation at me for “cultural appropriation”. But I don’t care. I like Mahogany cards. They say what they mean, and mean what they say. Like the one I bought my wife in 2006, featuring a pleased man in a church suit checking out his lady friend’s curves, saying, “Baby, sometimes when I look at you, I just want to shake my head . . . and tell you these three special words . . . mmm-mmm-mmm.” Or the man pressing his hand up against his lover’s, both of them in some sort of motherland -pajama-wear, with the man saying, “The woman I love is tropical warm . . . her skin brown as the nurturing earth. Like some wild exotic flower, she holds me in her spell. You are the woman whose face reflects all the joy, comfort, and sweetness I have known in my life.”
Is it kitschy? Is it corny? Is it like a writing-bad-dialogue-class at your local community college? Sure, Mahogany cards are all those things. But that’s what love is. Messy and personal and untidy. Telling the person you care about too much. Unlike the traditional Valentine’s Day-card featuring mass-produced, sanitized sentiment. Real expressions of love should be about being Wilson, not Engelbert.
Recently, I read an interview that struck me. It came out of the director Judd Apatow’s excellent book of interviews with comedians and other comic geniuses, Sick in the Head. In a 2012 interview with the legendary late director Mike Nichols (he was alive at the time; it wasn’t a séance), Nichols held forth on Apatow’s film This is 40, about married people struggling through middle age. Nichols said: “Your movie is so entirely about being that thing that isn’t two people but something more. How you get it and how hard it is to maintain and how, since it leads to the best thing of all, which is children, how central it is to our lives. It is our lives. But your take on it, which is to concentrate on the most unsentimental parts of it, that every—even taking a dump. How much more down-to-earth can you get? But it’s not only about love; it’s about spirit and it’s about what love really is, which is not mawkish; it’s an everyday happiness that you couldn’t describe to a Martian because it looks like something else. Happy people look like something else. They don’t look like happy people. Have you ever noticed that? They look like involved, or maybe even angry people.”
Happy, imperfect people. This is what I try to convey to my own wife in my own Valentine’s doggerel that I inscribe in her Mahogany card. Such as a poem I composed for her in 2006:
Or maybe this timeless classic, from 2015:
As you can see in the disparity between the two poems, with age comes wisdom.
But as I was reviewing these Valentine’s Day’s cards, all of which my wife saves in an old hat box, I was moved. Not by the Mahogany writers’ words, nor by my own (admittedly) inspirational offerings, but by the fact that there were so many. And that she took care to save them. That they’d accumulated over time, stacked up like cordwood. As some sort of evidence of a life lived, together. Which is the real stuff of love and marriage. It’s not about some stranger’s manufactured sentiment, or even one particular expression of affection. But rather, it’s about cumulativeness and constancy. About continuing to choose the one you have chosen, who makes your life full. The remarkable unremarkableness of it all. The everyday miracle.
Years ago, there was one card I sent her, which I meant then, and I mean now. It contained neither my Mahogany pinch-hitter’s sentiments. Nor my own embarrassing doggerel. But rather, the work of a real poet: the great Thomas Lynch, who, in addition to being a master prose stylist and highly-decorated poet, is a working mortician in Milford, Michigan. So he tends to see life in both the here-and-now and in the hereafter. He wrote a poem, some years ago, called “The Nines”, which I once slipped into my Mahogany card, in an attempt to say it all better than I ever could:
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
