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It's Valentine's Day and I want to take this opportunity to yell at both men and women. Sit down and make yourself comfortable.
Men: get your butt off the Barcalounger and go buy a card. (Forget that I just told you to sit down.) Don't give me that palaver about feeling coerced and bullied into this culturally constructed retail-fabricated manipulative date on the calendar. Forget the routine about wanting to express your emotions honestly or the whole song-and-dance about Valentine's Day being a celebration of sentimental extortion.
Women: just stop it, now. If you don't get what you want for Valentine's Day it does not mean that you get to act like the protagonist from The Diary of Anne Frank. If you want to celebrate Valentine's Day in the manner to which your six-year-old self became accustomed then it is up to you to buy funny cute cards and give them to your girlfriends and colleagues, along with those little candy hearts which rot your teeth from six feet way (made from compressed nuclear waste and sawdust, these say "be mine" and "I'm really no longer commitment phobic"-that one has really tiny print.)
Men: the reason why you can't use the "I-am-being-pressured-into-declarations-of-affection-that-I-would-quite-happily-give-were-I-not-feeling-strong-armed-into-it" argument is because you guys love hype. You guys used hype when you drew big animals on the walls of caves in Lascaux to get yourselves in the mood to hunt.
For example: one month or more before the Super Bowl, the American media was whipping you into a frenzy of anticipation-a foaming at the mouth goggle-eyed foot-stomping lather of enthusiastic expectation-that in no way diminished your appetite for the actual event. You didn't go bicycle riding because you were just so darn fed up with the artificiality and ritualized nature of the day. You sat down and raised hell.
So why all of a sudden are you making sarcastic and rude remarks about greeting card commercials? What gives you the right to be snarky about flower-giving and chocolate-eating when you so recently embraced the idea of barbequed wings and light beer? It's like Super Bowl Sunday or the endless weeks leading up to the World Series are part of a contract that you make with the culture to reaffirm your masculinity. Good for you. Nobody has any problems with this. Knock yourselves out and enjoy. Just don't then turn around and say that you need to avoid Valentine's Day because of the hard-sell. Lose the lines about how women should feel bad about dropping hints or leaving post-it reminders or emailing you hourly in order to help you understand the importance of Valentine's Day to us. We're only trying to help.
Men, the real reason why you hate Valentine's Day is because you hate feeling controlled. I learned this from my co-author Gene Weingarten. In I'm With Stupid, the book we wrote together, Weingarten confesses, "[Men] fear losing emotional control and proving ourselves weak in front of others."
Why?
"He is genuinely puzzled by the fact that this woman can bring herself to love something as lumpy and ugly as he is, and that she will actually sleep with him. He wouldn't sleep with him."
Yet while that admission is both and adorable might even be true, it still doesn't mean men don't have to send cards. E-cards don't count. I'm not sure exactly why but I know they don't.
My friend Lydia suggests "It's a question of effort. If you don't have to leave the house during the card-giving transaction than it is a bankrupt gesture; even Jane Austen talks about necessity of masculine exertion in matters of the heart."
Women: don't go nuts. Because, let's be honest, in most respects you would not want your life to be what it was like in the third grade when you were guaranteed to receive Valentines. You don't want to spend most of your day in a room where there's a bucket of sand in case anybody throws up. You don't want to have to raise your hand to go to the potty. And most of all you don't want to have to give Valentine's to people you can't stand such as the little girl in third grade whose perfect hair was always beribboned, whose smile was always dimpled, and who wouldn't sit next to you at lunch.
At least as a grown-up you get to choose those upon whom you will lavish affection.
