Newsletter No. 71: VALENTINES 2015

The Valentine’s Day Newsletter

Somewhere deep in our bylaws there is surely something that requires us to either extoll the virtues of self-love or produce a list of Valentine’s Day-related tips and/or tricks in our annual Valentine’s newsletter.  Every year, when this love holiday approaches our horizon, we muster our best collective heart-on in hopes of making your Valentine’s Day better, easier, or just less stressful.

Some years we’ve written you love letters, and some years we’ve focused on the love we have for our co-op, or the amazing stuff we have in our shop.  All of these are passionate loves for us even if the kind of love we feel in each instance varies wildly.

Our passion for Valentine’s Day stems from the fact that it is the only day of the year that pays any kind of attention to what we do.  On every other day - be it Earth Day or Christmas Day or Grandparents’ Day or Tuesday - romantic love is almost never on the menu despite the way our society centralizes and assumes romantic love as a default - but somehow not very important state of being.

Paradoxically, whether or not you’re in a romantic love relationship, Valentine’s Day and the pressures contained within are almost an inevitability, and you’re either expected to not forget to make a reservation and buy some flowers or a sex toy or some chocolates, or you’re expected to feel badly for not having done so.  It is a bit like Christmas - it doesn’t matter whether or not you actively celebrate it, it is awfully hard to not be aware of.

So, what do we do with all of this?  Of course, we love Valentine’s Day because it means that people are actively and outwardly indicating the importance of love and sex, but somehow it just underscores the lack of priority we give to all sorts of love on a daily basis.

Further, we all know that love is so much more complicated than anything we’ll experience in mainstream media’s coverage of the holiday.  Valentine’s Day doesn’t just advocate for romantic love, it actively attempts to restrict the kinds of love we can experience by setting such precise and exacting standards for how we think about and demonstrate our love.

Where’s the greeting card for romantic love that doesn’t have an erotic component?  Why don’t we acknowledge eros, or limerance, or our polyamorous loves, or self-love at all on any day of the year?

As people who have being talking about sex and love for seventeen years, we’ve had a lot of time to reflect on all of the love that we’ve personally experienced as well as, the snippets of your love that we have had the good fortune to witness.  For all of the supposed similarities in how we experience love, we can say with some certainty that the way that you love and experience love is completely unique to you and your loves. 

Even the various kinds and intensities of love that you will experience throughout your lifetime will be different from each other.  There is nothing standard or default about love, and just like sex, there is no sense  in confining love to a particular day, form, person, or object of pleasure if that’s not what your heart truly desires.