Good Mo(u)rning Mr. Valentine

It’s that time of the year again, and given the laws of relativity, it amazes me how soon the “this time” of the year comes. Today is THE day, your only opportunity to show how much you love your spouse/partner/girl/boy friend. So what if countries are at war, you are thinking of switching boy/girl friends, you hate your in-laws or you have realized this is perhaps a merger of convenience and not a marriage of love. This is your only chance to publicly show the expansiveness of your love. 

Tonight, there will be gifts, flowers, candle night dinners, and claims of husband taking half day off work, or better still, not going to work at all. Tonight there will be sultry love making, with all your half-baked and malformed teenage fantasies from the Harlequin Romances coming true. How do I know all this? From Facebook of course. Is there a better medium of showoff affluence display than Facebook? There will be 6 dozen “surprise” roses arriving at office during an unsuspecting moment when you are at a meeting and pretend you didn’t even know it is Valentine’s Day. Oh oh oh, I am so surprised, I just fainted. 

There would be bars and standards set in comparison to previous years, or better still, in comparison to what your friends got this year. Like the World Cup cricket, there will be live updates of the different stages and phases of the display of love. “Oh I just got a bunch of flowers at work and someone made sure that everyone in office knew about it before I did”. “Oh hubby is chopping onions and crying, in the process of cooking the “surprise” tandoori chicken for dinner”. “Look there he goes hunting for the matchstick to light the candle for the candle lit dinner”. “Oh now he is at Tiffany’s with his ex-college girl friend, deciding which diamond to buy for me (we are now all friends, you see)”. “Oh, I also got a phone call from someone who is not really my girl friend, but we are great open minded buddies you see. It’s all about being in love with everyone at the same time”. “Look, the husband just confronted the boss and told him how he doesn’t care that he is on pager duty, and he is taking off for the rest of the afternoon”.

Honestly, would you have much respect for a person who refuses to go to work because it is Valentine’s Day? I would actually, I will go swooning at his feet out of respect, wondering if he can differentiate between praise and sarcasm. With a bunch of carnations and an incarnation of Cupid for a husband, the only good thing missing in life would be a live documentation of the amorous life you lead. Facebook comes into the picture now and fulfills and surpasses all expectations of a live coverage of love, longing, hormones, pheromones, and expectation fulfillment in the name of “Surprise!!!!”. 

I was greeted by an email this morning that read, “Have you experienced that deep-rooted longing, the longing for a love that is big, beautiful, and blissful?” Of course I have, I muttered to myself, recovering after falling off my chair. With 5 core courses, 3 days/week workout, research work, homework, assignments, classroom observations, writing a bunch of papers, learning the new NVivo and SPSS software, and modeling logistic regression data, all I feel at the end of the day is a “longing for that big and beautiful love”. Hence I take a shower, tuck myself in bed, play a few rounds of online scrabble, cocoon inside the bed reading the book “He’s not that into you”, and before I know, I am snoring my brains out, and it is morning again, the alarm is shrieking with routine discipline, and it’s time to run to work. Isn’t that big, beautiful love? 

Maybe not. No, really, it is refreshing to see so many people view life and romanticism through a different lens, a lens where there is joy in not just receiving gifts, but in showing it off on a social networking site as well. I don’t know if it is age, hormones, or mental makeup, but who cares? At least you are not wasting and whiling your dhalti jawani setting youth hunched on categorical predictors and missing data handling. And don’t take my words seriously. Long before I saw doctors, I knew I suffered from the “Sour Grapes Syndrome”.

Happy Valentines Day you people. Keep the love alive, kicking, and most importantly, showing! For it isn't love if it doesn't show.

sunshine