Happy Valentine's Day!
My piece in WORLD and a Read the Comments
Good Moaning all! I’m over in WORLD today talking about why you should celebrate Valentine’s Day. Check it out!
Reminiscing over the 20 years he has edited the Modern Love section of The New York Times, Daniel Jones remembers a piece by a woman named Alisha whose high school boyfriend “died by suicide.” “She finds solace in understanding that it’s not that flowers (and love) are beautiful and fleeting;” he writes, “they’re beautiful because they’re fleeting. Meaning we must cherish them in the moment, knowing they can’t last. As she puts it, upon seeing a wash of flower petals littering the ground: ‘How startlingly beautiful impermanence can be.’”
If you appeared suddenly from another cosmos and only read the Modern Love section, you would conclude that Americans are pining for want of love. Two or three times a week I pop over to see what strange new dysfunctional “situationship” is on display for the reading public. Will it be a polyamorous polycule? Ethical non-monogamy? A justification for divorcing a man you still love because of your journey to self-actualization? Every day some heartbreaking story is told. As a Christian, I am always appalled by these narratives of “modern” love. They don’t feel modern at all. They feel regressive, tragic, and, more often than not, completely clueless.
In the month of February, the tide of disordered love reaches a fever pitch. For Valentine’s Day has been transformed from a harmless time to pass out pretty cards or murmur “Happy Valentine’s Day” into the ear of your beloved, to be an anxious display of consumption, those immiserating secular festivals where social obligation meets personal ennui at scale, and usually in the aisle of some grocery store when I am innocently attempting to restock my fridge. Before Christmas was even over, every store I entered already had a Valentine’s Section, a conspicuous array of red-wrapped chocolates (now stale), and bins of expensive stuffed animals. Right after the New Year, pink, purple, and red carnations and roses appeared at the door of my local supermarket. Against my will I pause, however momentarily, to wonder if my husband loves me enough to buy me the flowers my soul longs for.
And, below the line, a Read The Comments as a Valentine’s Treat for supporters of the blog. Have a lovely day!!
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Demotivations With Anne to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.