What Love Has To Do With It

So, here comes that day again, where everything is covered in blood red and bubble-gum pink and you are just trying to buy a pair of socks and the only thing available has little hearts or a fat baby cupid on them....and oh God, it must be Valentine's Day.

This time last year, I had just broken up with a guy, N, that I had dated way too long for anyway, but it just sort of kept happening. He bothered me with his pompous guitar playing and when he gave me a burned CD, (silly me, thinking they were songs from his favorite bands) I quickly realized it was all him....playing the electric guitar with an alarming amount of vigor. N always had grease in his fingernails, from being a mechanic, and wore too tight of pants. He really was a nice guy, but other than having a shared love for Mumford and the Avett Brothers, I wasn't sure what else there was to talk about.

I suppose breaking up with N ranked somewhere on my list of: Send grandma a big-ass Valentine's card, buy peanut butter for survival, schedule hair appt., break up with N.......

Does this make me sound mean? I hope not. But, let's be honest, unless someone is really blowing my socks off it's just not that worth having my precious time yanked from my palms. Not that the initial games and intrigue aren't enticing, because of course they are, but eventually, moving so many pieces start to make my hands hurt and I just want to go home.

Last weekend, I went out to Nasty's, Austin's best hole-in-the-wall bar ever, with some of my favorite people in this city. We drank great beer and played egregious pool and all the other great activities one expects from a wildly adorable sitcom about twenty-somethings. In this event, A, a good guy friend, was asking about my love life. I have grown use to this being a topic of high interest to those that are strictly monogamous and 'tied down'. I suppose one could even find humor in the, who is Kristen dating NOW? game, depending on the phase in my life. After telling A all of my male woes and raves he looked at me and said, "But wouldn't you rather be single than just date someone not great?" Well geez. When you put it like that, DUH, and of course that is totally true. After all, I am quite content doing things alone, more than most I fear, and thus I am not as wildly overcome with despair when men come in and out and prove to be disappointing (which, to date, that has been all of them, not that I'm counting or anything...). A smiled, perhaps because he was feeling better that I wasn't dating just because I had nothing better to do, and was calming his own darling fears that I would settle and then spend my forties staring out a glass window at an overly manicured garden or something. He gave me a nice pat and the back and I too felt reassured, having verbalized that I indeed would not let mediocre male behavior fly, and we continued to drown another pint.

The truth is, there is a lot of love happening in my life. Why, let me tell you, my students continue to surprise me with their warmth and the way they divulge precious information like beautiful little sand dollars that have taken so many years to be created and revealed by the ocean. I look forward to little hugs in the hallway, their happy faces when they get answers right, and the way those feisty little detention boys hover around my room when I'm not even their teacher! Lucky me! And, can I just say, seeing my 8th grade boys choose Tupac poems about loving unconditionally, was enough to make me literally make a cooing noise, then abruptly have to do a sort of cough-clearing-of-throat cover up. But truly, my work allows for me to feel alarmingly loved, and let me tell you, the feeling is mutual. Plus, let's be honest, there isn't a cuter pair of nephews than my little boys in Colorado. If there is anything I thank Apple for, it's letting me FaceTime with my babies in Denver, and for letting me see the newest train track Carter has set up, and the way Weston rests his soft head on my sister's chest, with those big pink cheeks and long eyelashes like his father. Why, just last week, Carter proudly snatched me (well, the me inside the phone screen) and dragged me to the impressive stack of snow outside their house, yelling, "Tia, snow, snow!"

I suppose sometimes, it is normal to think, at 25, that you just have rotten luck, or that you pick bad male specimens, but I think that is mostly narcissistic to think you're the only one with such odds. I mean, seriously, is there anyone in NYC under 30 and in a serious relationship? Could Katherine Heigl and Mandy Moore have careers if there weren't so many single women with dating battle wounds lining their hearts? Certainly not. I mean, I am a product of a father who treats me with respect and as an intellectual equal, and a mother who, verbatim, told me, upon telling her I was dating two guys at the same time, "Kristen, don't make any commitments, you've only been going out with them a month! Have fun!"

I do like fun, and I am young (though I feel old after controlling teenagers all day), and I like the idea that I am still free to do all the little delicious things that make me happy. I can head up a book club, do happy hour every Friday, go to coffee shops on weekends, start a boot camp, go to writing meetups, take up sewing, watch hours slip away at Book People, and leave the country for a month without blinking. Yes, I suppose eventually these things will be eclipsed by a relationship, perhaps even a small-town life that will frighten me at times, but overall I think that there is a lot of love around me, floating and bobbing like little balloons with fat inflated heads, reminding me that it's alright to be just where I am in life. Love isn't meant to be categorized, as we tend to do, always ranking romantic relationships as number one. For I know it to be divinely true that, when my students hug or thank me, when my mother tears up about how much she misses me, or my best friends back home remind me of our past adventures together, I don't think of men at all, I just think of how damn lucky I am to have any of that love stuff at all.

And I can not end this without telling you of the most important, yet most difficult love of all: the love you have for yourself. Now, I know this is starting to sound like a quote from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants or something, but it's true. So many people don't really know or love themselves, but instead absorb and deflect the love from others. I feel grateful that at 25, I at least know myself, though there are new discoveries all the time, like the fact that I literally do squeal and jump into H's lap at scary movies, but overall, I am content with who I have become and I could certainly look in the mirror in some kind of video montage and tell myself, "Hey you, I kinda love ya."


So, in case you hate Valentine's Day, try not to, because it's a bit cliche to do that and also, you are way too loved to have a right to hate anything, don't you think?