Ahh, Valentine’s Day. Now little more than a mile marker on the highway of our culture’s deteriorating self-indulgence, it’s a holiday that I could do without, to say the least.
I’ve been lucky enough so far in my life not to be involved in a real “relationship” on Valentine’s Day, and this of course has saved me tons of money and emotional investment I would have spent on meaningless dinners in fancy restaurants and expensive gifts devoid of any true sentiment or feeling.
I do not think too highly of “relationships,” and instead of offering some clichéd dissection of how Valentine’s Day was invented by the Hallmark Corporation, I’m setting my sights on a bigger target. If you’re a woman, you should probably stop reading right now.
Our cultural conception of “love” is hopelessly misguided. As Joseph Campbell notes in his “Power of Myth,” the troubadours of the twelfth century were the first ones to think of courtly love and romance in the way we do now. Before then, it didn’t exist. Now do we really want things as important as our notions of love and human interaction being dictated by a bunch of wandering fancy boy minstrels from 900 years ago? I didn’t think so.
Besides, what is a “relationship” within the confines of the college experience besides an endless string of broken promises, empty pronouncements of love and hurt feelings all leading up to disastrous breakup after disastrous breakup? Don’t get me wrong, relationships always start off well, but in college you can’t keep them going long, nobody can.
That point leads me to my broad, overreaching conclusion. Ladies, if you’re still reading, just remember the following: all guys are scumbags. It’s true, we all know it, and there’s no getting around this basic fact. Men, especially those in college, are just unprepared and unable to maintain any sort of meaningful relationship at all. So if you think you are in a meaningful relationship, you’re lying to yourself, trust me.
I hate to be such a bring-down around a holiday like Valentine’s Day, but it’s better for people to see the light now. So don’t believe the hype, don’t think you can build a meaningful relationship, don’t look back in anger, and don’t believe in some meaningless, mass-produced cliché.
At least not today.
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