The 25.8 billion Dollar Day Nobody Actually Celebrates + Link Love
Unless everyone I know is lying to me
The first time I hung out with my husband was on Valentine’s Day and we didn’t know it. A gaggle of perpetually-singles and divorcées got together and ate spaghetti for no other reason except it was the night that worked for us.
Afterwards, over dishes, while I washed and he dried, he and I talked about pacifism. It was the first of many conversations together about pacifism and then a month later he asked me out on a date and three months later—to the day—we got married in his backyard with a hundred people we loved sitting behind us on quilts and Adirondack chairs.
In my circles at the time, most women were married by their early twenties, popping out babies by their mids, and at nearly 35, I and my other unmarried peers were the anomaly. Even though my married friends told me otherwise, I believed they were still having all the fun on Valentine’s Day. They had someone to appreciate their lacy undies and bring them roses, or at least they had the potential for it, which was almost the same thing in my mind.
Ten years in and I can confidently say I was wrong about Valentine’s Day. We’ve never celebrated it. One year I might have made an apple spice cake with some apples that were turning bad, but I don’t think either of us noted the date and there was no pink to be found.
February 14th was honestly more fun and angsty when I was single and thought I was missing out and so planned all kinds of fun V-day things (lacy undies! heart banners! pink cookies! chick-flicks!) to keep myself from being sad about being unloved.
It has me thinking about all the things I’ve gotten sad and angsty about, not just because I don’t have something I want, but because I imagine (despite being told otherwise) someone else has it in spades. Like a sunny house or calm kids who do crafts quietly or regular vacations or room for egg-laying chickens in the backyard.
I remember a few weeks before we left our little river cottage, I was sat on the hammock swing of our porch staring out at all the beauty around me. Perennial gardens and a firepit, birch trees we’d planted, and the quiet flow of the river in front of our house, and I thought to myself, “I’m still anxious. All this beauty in front of me, all this peace around me, birdsong and sun, swings and a screened-in porch, and I’m still sitting out here practicing breathing in and out, in and out.”
I wish I’d known way back then that Valentine’s Day was actually, in many ways, painful for married people too. A day where they also imagined lacy undies and roses were happening in the houses of other married people, when at theirs there was steely silence or sheer exhaustion or play dough stuck to the grains of wood in the tabletops or unshaven legs or late nights at the office or terrible traffic on the way home or a forgotten roast in the fridge.
The point is, the grass seems greener until you’re in it and you realize all grass is still just planted in plain old ordinary dirt.
Here’s a little secret: most of us are not celebrating Valentine’s Day. Even the ones who chock money at this 25.8 billion dollar day, they’re mostly just doing the thing they think everyone else is doing and so everyone else feels like they have to do it too. Go out for dinner if you like, buy some flowers just because, wear the lacy underwear, but do it on the 11th or the 16th or an ordinary Tuesday or Thursday or just because you feel like it 🧡
Below the paywall is my regular round-up of good links and beauty I’ve saved. If you’re not a paid subscriber and you’re needing a little goodness in your world today, maybe today is the day you upgrade!