Valentine’s Day Surprises



Depending on your age Valentine’s Day can mean many different things. If your seven, it means tons of chalky candy, exchanging cards with classmates and five bucks from Grandma. If your fourteen, it can be a struggle and a joy to find the perfect gift for what you are absolutely sure is the love of your life (who dumps you two weeks later because a guy with his license just asked her out). If your twenty-five, it can be the day you tell someone you truly do love them or at least go through the motions and buy the roses. If your forty, you get to celebrate with both a spouse and kids. If your sixty-five, you and your significant other can look back on life and smile about the joy given and received. If your eighty, you eat chalky candy, exchange cards with other people in the home and get a homemade card from your grandchild.

With the exception of the first and last one, Valentine’s Day is a day for those in love or at least a relationship. Being single doesn’t matter when your seven, because everyone gets the same cards. Being single doesn’t matter when your eighty, because you are alive. But for the rest of us, there is always the question of what to do? Some singles try to ignore Valentine’s Day and go about their life as though nothing is different. But from radio ads gushing about ring sales to specials on Champaign and at the grocery store, it is hard not to see it. Others try to find ways to celebrate with other single friends, they find bars, restaurants, movie theaters to meet. But at all of these places there are filled with lovers walking hand in hand pushing in the face of the singles the relationship they do not have. For me, I sort of like Valentine’s Day. Not because, I have any one. (No, I am alone. Mostly in the Jake Barns way; rather, then in the Hunchback way.) But because I always enjoy watching people pull out the surprise relationship.

Valentine’s Day is the only day where a friend you are rather tight with can pull out a significant other that has never been mentioned before. Three nights earlier you and your boy can be in the club looking at the ladies; but on Valentine’s he is with someone he just has gotten around to mentioning yet. Or you can have coffee with another friend and she can complain about how there are no nice guys out there. Less then forty-eight hours later on Valentine’s, she is with a guy she has been ‘hanging out with’ for awhile.
Many times these relationships will disappear shortly after the first Spring flowers. Though I have no idea where these relationships start or why they end. I am always enamored which friend will find one for the next February 14th.