About NML’s Valentine’s Day, and tests of love.
Reclaimed Baggage laments that guys don’t appear to like Valentine’s day.
Let me use Harrison Ford’s ‘Six Days, Seven Nights’ movie as a metaphor.
Ford plays ‘Quinn’, a footloose beach bum enjoying amorous contacts as he finds them.
Ann Heche plays a professional woman, Robin, in a committed relationship — stable, comfortable. She enjoys the attentions of her ‘romantic’ boyfriend David Schwimmer as Frank. Frank does all the romantic stuff you could imagine.
Only the romantic stuff turns out to be a fantasy life that Frank lives, that happens to include Robin. When Robin is lost at sea, Frank finds solace for the evening with a native girl. Oops.
Meanwhile Robin and the crusty, laid-back Quinn are stranded on an uninhabited tropical island. The inital interactions are based on initial social role stereotypes, but the facade wears off to reveal reasonable, responsible people. Each behaves honorably, and earns a bit of trust and respect from the other. And they find fun is possible. After an exciting brush with modern-day pirates, including a fight with the pirates, a leap off into the ocean, and a run through the jungle dodging bullets — they spend the night snuggled — as friends.
Robin is honest — she breaks off the engagement because she realizes her heart isn’t engaged, and just being comfortable with Frank isn’t enough reason to wed. Frank isn’t thinking of anything but how his cheating makes him look bad. Which is true — his shallow and carnal attraction to the native girl is inappropriate, if his heart had really been engaged with Robin. His claim of ‘no character whatsoever’ is melodramatic. Disloyal, dishonest, untrustworthy, those I would endorse. Also self-deluded.
At the end of the story, Quinn and Robin both find a desire to pursue their friendship as a couple, with a great desire for more intimacy with each other.
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My point? Romance, the courtly behavior stuff, was invented 500-600 years ago. It is *recent* in human history, by anyone’s calendar. Valentine’s day is a revival of an ancient Greek and Roman type festival honoring gods of wine and sexual intercourse, whatever glossing the Catholic church put on the occasion when thy appropriated the festival.
I don’t think that expecting ‘romance’ from your partner is ever responsible, adult behavior. It is manipulative, deceptive, and risky behavior, whoever initiates the activity. Either your partner is loyal, caring, honest, and true — or not. The courtly ‘trials’ to ‘prove’ love are hideous and intended to cause harm. Supposedly the wounds garnered, in flesh, in expenses, prove the amount of devotion.
So on Valentine’s day, decide exactly what you and your partner will do. Everything, every little detail. No surprises allowed, with penalties for anything unplanned. Then choose to do the couples things, the pamperings, the tests of devotion (gag me with a spoon) for the fun of it, to revel in each other’s company while focusing on feelings and fun — or let the day go. Just one more day celebrated in each other’s company and regard.
No tests of love. Please.