Harry & Andrea

Be mine! Be mine! Be mine! What does that even mean? Ownership? Aren’t we in the century of total equality and political correctness? How can that phrase still show up in boxes of chalky hearts today? Every year, it’s the same thing. Red hearts exploding at every turn. Pink teddy bears grinning stupidly. Chocolate, babies, cake pans, bread, the new and improved kid icon, lamps, bowls, tshirts, chairs, hair extensions—all in the shape of a HEART!

I’ve never gotten any gift-if I’m getting a gift at all-that wasn’t processed and handled by hundreds of people before it arrived in my hands. So much for a personal touch, huh! Hallmark tells us that love is buying a card that someone we’ll never meet wrote. Russell Stover, Whitman’s and Ghirardelli all tell us that love is sugar and caffeine side-by-side and packed into a heart-shaped box. Starbucks tells us that love can fit in a coffee mug. Verizon tells us that love is a cell phone that sends text messages with words the sender would never actually speak. What ever happened to a gift being an expression of how well you know the person receiving it? Huh?

And what about the new modern hearts, Fax me? Email me? Huh? I don’t feel loved when I get a fax. I normally feel annoyed because it’s that fax spam that promises a cruise but never delivers. And email, come on. I spend so much time opening and deleting emails from people I’ve never met that I don’t have time to respond to the people I have met! Love is not going to reach me in the form of an email. In fact, I could probably give you more examples of miscommunication through email than I could examples of sweet, bona fide, heart-felt, sincere luuuv.

Yea, sure, I’m married now, have a permanent valentine/someone to spend holidays with/the love of my life and all that jazz, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t still be cynical about fake love.

Commercial Valentine’s Day doesn’t quite make my Top Five Favorite Holidays list.