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I don't really like Valentine's Day. Most people know I'm not affectionate. Most people know I'm not usually serious. Most people know I'm pretty cheap too. However, I've always felt that the day has tremendous potential. The real reason I say I hate it is because I've spent the last 26 Valentine's Days alone.

Honestly, while I don't have some essential Valentine's Day qualities, I do have others. I'm very sensitive. I enjoy candy. I'm very good-looking. The problem is, I don't exude love or loveliness. I believe in it, but it's not worth faking (like I suppose many people do to get what they want on Valentine's Day).

I didn't always believe in love. Just a couple of years ago I went around telling people that love is pure selfishness. If being kind to someone makes us happy, then we're kind to get ourselves happy. Ultimately, we only feel what we, ourselves, feel. We don't really feel what someone else feels, not without some kind of astral projection.

Since then, I've changed my mind. Maybe it's because I've stopped being happy when I'm kind to people. So now I believe in love, because it hurts. It's real. I think a lot of people still look at romance and how it helps themselves.

I am romantic. Really. But I see romance in weird ways, which is probably why I'm alone every year (well, one of several reasons). To illustrate, I wanna talk about a few of my very favorite love stories from the ages. Each story has a virtue I think is worth mentioning.

Selflessness -- George and Mary from It's a Wonderful Life

I'm not cheap just to be cheap. I've never associated romance with extravagance. Ironically, I think one reason I don't do really fancy things very often is because I've seen so many romantic movies. In 99% of all romantic movies, the main characters learn that since they have each other they don't need all the fancy stuff money can buy. Some people see a chateau in Europe and think romantic thoughts. I see a shack next to a swamp and think how wonderful life would be in such a place provided I had someone to love and share it with. Love makes extravagance meaningless.

That was sort of a tangent. The point is, all George Bailey wanted to do was to get out of Bedford Falls and take his new wife with him all over the world. He saved up a couple thousand dollars and the newlyweds were on the way out of town when the family savings and loan suddenly ran into trouble. When George stayed to fix things, Mary, still holding the money, volunteered it to bail the business out. That night, the couple began their honeymoon in an old vacant house in the town they were so anxious to leave.

Strangely, it was wonderful. Mary told George it's what she always wanted. I always thought Mary was so so sexy after she sacrificed her honeymoon fund to help out the town. The weird thing about this couple is that they love each other so much, but they go on to care about others after they latched on to each other. You can't say that about too many people. I tend to notice that when couples hook up and claim to be in love, their world becomes a population of each other and no one else.

Devotion -- Connor and Heather from Highlander

I didn't always like the movie Highlander. I think it was about the fourth time I caught it on TNT on a solitary Saturday night when I realized how good it is. Anway, for those of you who don't know what it's about, there's this guy named Connor from like 12th century Scotland. As a young man he learns from his mentor that he's one of a very select group of immortals on earth who don't age or die.

So he's cursed to be forever young. Yeah, tough life. Anyway, he meets Heather, a spunky little Scottish bird. Connor's mentor tells him that he needs to dump the girl, because of the disparity in their life spans. Connor doesn't listen and he falls in love with Heather and the two live in a cute little Scottish cottage. In a touching scene we see the years go by as Connor stays the same and Heather ages into an old woman. We see Connor still give her affection after she physically becomes old enough to be his grandmother. We see Connor still cry over her as a lost lover would when she finally dies an ancient and frail woman.

The guy had several outs if he wanted them. How hard could it be to get away from an old woman? The point is, he didn't even consider leaving her after she became less than useful to him. He wanted to be devoted when he didn't have to be.

Faith -- Lister and Kochanski from Red Dwarf

Lister became the last man in the universe after awakening from millions of years of sleep in stasis on a deep space mining vessel. The guy sure was a positive romantic though. All he ever talked about his hologram crewmate and the lifeform that evolved from his cat was a woman named Christine Kochanski. She was another crew member on the ship, but, like everyone else, had died millions of years earlier. Lister still had some amount of faith that somehow, as big as the universe was, he'd be able to have another chance with her. Fate, he thought, was on his side even if the odds that someone returning to life after millions of years were pretty astronomical.

In true science fiction storydom, the person named Kochanski miraculously somehow appeared in Lister's time and space. She joined Lister's crew. She got to know him... and she hated him.

Incidentally, the best Depeche Mode cd is called Songs of Faith and Devotion. It's worth a few paragraphs by itself. I'll just say this about it: the title is very fitting, but not they way you might think so. I'll talk about that later.

So, yeah. These stories get to me. They're beautiful. Happy Valentine's Day.

(13feb04)