Hating Valentine's Day Read online

  I did a bit of research a few years back, for Bliss’s Valentine’s Day wedding packages. What I found out blew me away. For a start, Valentine’s Day has its origins in the Roman festival Lupercalia, where goats and dogs were sacrificed and women were lashed in the streets with goatskin thongs. Apparently being lashed in the streets with goatskin thongs was supposed to ensure fertility and easy child delivery.

  Sure.

  There’s no disputing it in my mind. Valentine’s Day is fake and ridiculous and, as far as I can see, says nothing about ‘real’ love. The kind of love that means you can clean up your partner’s vomit and not be sick yourself.

  2. Because it’s bad for relationships

  It’s simple, really. Guys hate Valentine’s Day.

  When it comes to Valentine’s Day, guys are smart. They know what’s going on and that’s why, for them, it’s a day of fear. Guys have somehow evolved to the point where they are now able to cut through the emotional bullshit of the day to the truth—that Valentine’s Day is all about doing the ‘right thing’ so no one yells at you. To keep out of trouble they buy the over-priced flowers, the heart-shaped goodies and the weekends away. Everyone’s happy. And the day over, they can breathe a sigh of relief.

  But what I’d like to know is how many fights/break-ups/divorces occur because of Valentine’s Day compared to other days of the year? The men sit at home and wait in fear in case they’ve done the wrong thing. The women who don’t receive flowers at work rush home snarling. There’s so much pressure on relationships on Valentine’s Day it’s practically unbearable. People all over the world are pushed into proposing when they’re not quite ready. I know this for a fact because I see them a few months down the line (they’re the guys who hit the office mid-March with the scared, wild-horse-like eyes that flick all over the room searching for exit points).

  Valentine’s Day. It simply brings out all the ugly relationship problems that manage to lie fallow the rest of the year.

  3. Because, for me, it makes work a nightmare

  A wedding photographer who hates Valentine’s Day. I know it’s stupid. Strangely enough, I absolutely adore my job for the rest of the year. It’s great being involved in one of the biggest days in someone’s life. Every once in a while I’ll be out on a shoot when I realise this and look around me for a moment. It’s then that it usually hits me that what I’m doing is all that’s going to be left for these people after the day is over, and, while I’m not exactly saving the world or anything, I’m making a difference in a little way at least. It’s a great job. Everyone looks their best. Everyone has a good time. After all, everyone loves a wedding (well, they tend to get a bit cranky at the dry ones…).

  But, while I love my job the rest of the year, around Valentine’s Day I lose faith in it a little. The weddings I shoot on those days are that little bit soppier. A touch more cutesy. And there are always, always, gold Cupids, or cherubs, or something blah along those lines. I don’t like Cupids or cherubs. Especially the gold ones. Fat, stunted, shiny little things that they are…

  4. Because it’s the one day of the year you’re not allowed to be single

  Any other day of the year it’s not unusual for me to receive the odd comment from my married friends along the lines of ‘You’re lucky you’re still living the single life.’ But not around Valentine’s Day. Oh, no. On Valentine’s Day, living la vida sola is strictly verboten.

  Poor, poor Liv. While other people receive tiny pastel-coloured sugar hearts that read ‘Be Mine’ and ‘Let’s Be Friends’, I don’t even get ones that say ‘Be Someone Else’s, Please’ and ‘Let’s Just Be Friends’.

  On Valentine’s Day people assume all kinds of things about me because I don’t have Noah’s paired-off stamp of approval. They assume I don’t like men. Not true. I do. They assume that I can’t be bothered to date. Not true. I can. I’ve been on hundreds of dates. Well, maybe not hundreds, but lots. There was even a stage where I became a dating fiend. Someone pointed out to me that I was perhaps being a bit picky who I went out with. I’m not proud, so, for about a six-month period (on the rebound, I might add), I went nuts dating anything and everything, just to test the waters and see if they were right.

  I called it crazy dating.

  It didn’t work out.

  I dated a guy who chain-drank four martinis and then offered me a lift home on his motorbike. I dated a guy who told me he smoked cigars because it ‘looked cool’. I dated a guy who, between our mains and desserts, told me he could see me in his future. I wanted to ask if he saw me in his immediate future, waving him goodbye as he left the restaurant in a taxi, but I didn’t. I made a go of it. I tried. And I tried. And I tried.

  I did learn something from it all, however. What it comes down to is that men and I—we just don’t seem to get along.

  I’m hopeless when it comes to the whole dating game. With me, what you see is what you get. And I think maybe it’s better that way for all of us—the guys I date and me. I mean, this way they get the real Liv up front, and if they don’t like what they see—well, it saves us both wasting our time.

  Now, happy singledom seems to be the obvious choice. After the umpteenth scare-off during my crazy dating frenzy, I was tired. I was bored. So I made the conscious decision that I was going to stay single for a while. I came to the conclusion that it was stupid, waiting and hoping and putting my life on hold for something that might never happen. I had to get on with living. Be happy how I was. I went on the occasional date after that, but after a while I couldn’t even be bothered doing that. It’s been almost a year now since I’ve been out with a guy at all.

  I don’t think they mind.

  Rachel, however, has told me many a time that my ‘love and relationships are things that happen to other people’ theory is all too convenient, ‘I don’t want to put myself out there again’ rubbish. Whenever she says this, she also brings up Mike. Mike who I saw for just over a year and a half. Before he left me, that is. But Mike, in my opinion, must have been a fluke.

  These days, not having a guy in my life means I’ve got a lot more ‘me’ time. At the moment I’m on a bettering myself binge. I’ve started going to Spanish classes, dragging my butt to the gym three times a week (it’s the bit that needs to go the most) and reading more. As Justine pointed out before, I’m halfway through the collected works of Dickens at the moment.

  I’m proud to say I’m really enjoying the single life. So much so that I realised lately that it would have to take someone pretty special for me to be ready to give all this up and date again.

  Someone pretty darn special.

  5. Because I was dumped by the love of my life on Valentine’s Day two years ago and I can’t, won’t, and don’t want to get over it

  Damn. I hate getting to number five. For some reason, I always think it puts my other four, very salient and well-thought-out points in a bad light.

  Taking one large, last whiff of the vanilla and mandarin, I slide down in the bath until my head is under the water and I blow some bubbles. If I was a cartoon character, I’m guessing they’d say: ‘Please, please, please God, this year give me a break and let me just slip under the Valentine’s Day radar quietly.’

  Y Y Y Y

  The people I pass by at the sidewalk cafés look happy. And so they should. It’s a gorgeous blue-skied day, the heat hasn’t hit yet and they’re surrounded by their friends and good food they haven’t had to cook themselves.

  I long to join them. I long to have donned my jeans, singlet shirt and cap this morning and to have strolled down the road looking forward to an organic blueberry muffin and a large skinny latte. OK, so I really mean a white chocolate-chip muffin and a large hot mocha with extra chocolate sauce, but the longing’s just the same. For a moment or two I let myself pretend that in just a second I’ll wave to one of the groups, go over, sit down, place my order and shoot the breeze until eleven. Maybe even midday.

  But I don’t.

  Instead, I keep walking
. I realise now it was a mistake to make an appointment with Tania on a Saturday. I usually see her on a weekday afternoon, when the coffees are takeaway and everyone is in a rush to get back to the office. Those days are fine. Saturdays, however, are a downer. I feel my mood sink lower and lower until it reaches subterranean levels. I probably should have skipped that bath this morning and headed on out with Justine and Drew. Well, too late. Maybe I’ll just have to cheer myself up later with a slice of baked cheesecake.

  I walk past the cafés and up to the office buildings that adjoin them. When I get to the most boring-looking redbrick one, I push open the glass door and head for the lifts. On the third floor, I exit and walk all the way down the corridor to the office with the non-descript door. The office where all the glass has been covered from the inside with wooden venetian blinds. I worked out a while back that this is so you can’t see into the waiting room. All the other waiting rooms on this floor you can see straight into. On my right, I pass by an office filled with kids with shiny braces on their teeth. On my left, quite a few people sit with crutches by their sides. But not in the office I’m headed for.

  As I push open the door I know exactly what I’ll see, and I’m not disappointed. This is a psychologist’s office, and as I take a seat next to the magazines I realise why they put the venetian blinds up. It’s people’s minds that are sick in here, and they’re embarrassed about it. I’m sure they all call Tania a ‘therapist’, like I do. I’m also sure that the rest of the people waiting with me this morning all trudge off to their general practitioner once a month, collect their script for their low-dose anti-depressant and pop their pill each night—just like me. Yep, ‘therapist’ sounds a whole lot nicer than ‘psychologist’, any way you look at it.

  Not that anyone here is actually crazy, mind you. Really, it’s just a sad waiting room full of sad-looking people. They’re not crazy, they’re not nutcases—because this is a nice, up-market area. They’re just people like me whose lives haven’t quite worked out how they figured. I often wonder what’s going on in the little worlds of the people who wait with me each week, and today isn’t any different. I glance over at the woman seated across from me. Maybe her husband left her. Maybe her child died. Maybe she can’t get pregnant. Or maybe she’s just genetically predisposed to being miserable. Who knows?

  ‘Liv?’ I look up to see Tania picking out my folder from her secretary’s in tray. ‘Would you like to come in now?’

  I follow her into her office, where she closes the thick wooden door behind us and sits down.

  ‘Now,’ she says, flipping through her notes, ‘let’s finish off what we were having a chat about last week, shall we?’

  I have to get her to remind me what we were talking about. I mean, I know generally, because all we ever really seem to talk about are what I like to call the M&Ms—Mike and my mother. But specifically I’m lost, until Tania gives me a hint. The funny thing is, I think to myself before I start on about them again, most days I’d really prefer to talk about the kind of chocolate that doesn’t melt in your hand.

  Y Y Y Y

  An hour and a quarter later and I’m asking the most important question in the world. ‘What’s the baked cheesecake today?’

  I’m in luck. Today it’s berry—my favourite. Phew! For a moment I’d got a bit worried when the waitress had thought it was lime…I order a slice with ice-cream as well as cream, because I need the calcium. And I know I should be home, doing all the things I won’t be able to do next weekend—cleaning the shower, cleaning the toilet, scrubbing the sink—but stuff it. After the session I’ve just had with Tania, cheesecake is the only thing that’s going to get me through till next weekend.

  Well, at least next week I’ve got the week off. No Tania. No M&Ms (not the therapy kind, anyway).

  Waiting for my cheesecake and coffee, I look around me. The tables are dotted with couples. I used to be a couple. Just like them, I used to go out for coffee and a shared piece of cheesecake on a Saturday. I wonder absent-mindedly if I should get up and warn them. Warn all the females to get up and leave now, before they need the cheesecake like I do.

  The thing is, though, even if I did go over there, to each and every table, those women would only look at me as if I’d lost my mind. Just the same as I would have looked if someone had done the same thing to me when I was dating Mike. Because, of course, I never thought what happened to me would happen. I never saw it coming. Not on the first day. Not even on the last day. It was the kind of thing that happened to other people. The kind of people who ring into daytime talk radio stations.

  Mike and I clicked straight away. From the very first second. Even though he was still getting over the split from his wife, the warning bells didn’t sound in my head. And why should they have? It wasn’t as if he missed his wife—Amanda—for a start. She was long gone, and he seemed to think this was a good thing. That they were all better off this way. Well, except for Toby, I guess. The thing was, Mike had been desperate to be a dad, but it hadn’t been Amanda’s scene, really. She loved the whole pregnancy bit—the shopping, the fuss—but when her nine months were up, she wasn’t so keen on the actual baby—the mess, the screaming. She should really have been presented with Toby when he was about five. Which is what he is now. I can feel my face fall as I think about him. I miss Toby. He was—still is, I suppose—such a sweetie.

  Anyway, when Toby was just a baby Amanda had decided the whole happy families experience was too much and took off. Or, that is, she took off for a year and a half and then decided to come back. Which was when my life had kind of turned from talk radio to Jerry Springer.

  ‘Cheesecake and a skinny latte?’ The waitress standing beside me places a plate and glass down on the table. I nod and she retreats, taking my table number away.

  I realise what’s happened and am just about to get up when she comes back.

  ‘Sorry, I forgot…’ She places the single napkin-wrapped cake fork down on the table. ‘Can I get you anything else?’

  I look down at the single set of cutlery. The gigantic slice of cheesecake. With a huge scoop of ice-cream as well as an ample dollop of cream.

  Something else? I try to rearrange my facial expression. Just how depressed do I look?

  Y Y Y Y

  Monday 8 February-Six Days and Counting…

  As I drive the car out of the garage on Monday morning, I realise it hasn’t emerged since I put it in there Friday night. I’ve pretty much kept to my promise of conserving energy for the week ahead.

  I turn left out of the driveway onto the street and head for the studio, counting the times I’ve left the apartment this weekend. I only have to use one hand. And four fingers at that. Once to go to my appointment with Tania, once for my trip to the gym, once to pick up some Sunday-morning croissants and the paper, and once last night, when I went to my Spanish class at the local high school—all within walking distance.

  I should have plenty of energy stored up from a weekend spent on my back reading my Dickens collection and eating Clinkers (not the yellow ones—I hate the yellow ones). In fact, I expended so little energy this past weekend that it kind of reminds me of the time, during the Tamagotchi rage, that I overfed Sally’s pet on virtual ice-cream to boost its energy levels and it died.

  Now, there’s something to think about…

  But better to think of that than the other thing that’s been in the back of my mind these last couple of days—Mrs Batty-Smith’s funeral. I check the time on the dash clock—8:52. The funeral starts in an hour, and I have to say I’m not looking forward to it. Not surprising, really. What kind of a sicko looks forward to a funeral?

  I pull into the car park at the studio at one minute to nine to see Sally hovering around the open door. When she spots me, she surreptitiously stubs out her cigarette and puts up a finger. Not the one that gets the most exercise out and about in the Ferrari. This time it’s her index finger, in a ‘just a minute’ gesture. She ducks inside and comes back out with her handbag, giving
the door a good slam behind her. I notice she’s wearing a dark grey linen dress for the funeral—a colour far removed from her usual wardrobe of blinding yellows, screaming pinks and way-out limes.

  I unlock the passenger door and she opens it and sticks her head in. ‘I thought we’d better just go. It’s probably like a wedding—it’d look bad to come racing in behind the coffin, wouldn’t it?’

  I nod. ‘Most likely.’

  ‘Is it OK if we take your car? Mine’s a bit flashy for a funeral.’

  Yep, just a touch, I agree with her silently. ‘Do you know where we’re going?’ I have a quick feel around on the back seat of my car for the street directory.

  Sally snorts. ‘The crematorium at the end of the world. You mean you don’t know it?’

  ‘Sorry. I don’t get asked to do a lot of engagement shoots there.’

  We spend a few minutes locating the place—this crematorium really is at the end of the world; it’s going to take us the full hour just to get there—and head off.