Melville Cooke
VALENTINE'S DAY 2006, a more important day in the nation's psyche than Emancipation Day, came in a burst of red, white and roses. (Y'know, I always find it a bit incongruous when I see young ladies at the bus stop after work hours on Valentine's Day with a huge gift basket. The teddy bear, chocolates and flavoured condoms just don't quite jibe with buses which go 'ch, ch' and route taxis which toot.)
I, of course, believe in Valentine's Day as much as I do in Christmas; they are great for people who sell cellphones and lingerie, but bad for those who go into hire purchase arrangements of the settee and spousal kinds at those advertising agency prescribed times of good cheer and love respectively.
It is amazing how many people fall for the out and out fraudulence of Valentine's Day, dream weddings and all, but it goes to show how deep our need for a good relationship with someone (of the opposite sex, I fervently hope) runs.
Fortunately, despite having major success with coffee, French fries, the Internet and erections, the instant people have not come up with a formula for love (although that speed dating thing is a hell of an attempt). So while there is all this emphasis on sex and going out together, connecting with your partner and having a good time (and sex) every February 14, there is very little about actually building a relationship with your partner.
REVEALING YOURSELF
Y'see, that takes time, it takes effort, it takes a willingness on both sides, a certain level of mental intimacy, which is far superior to and outlasts physical intimacy. To stand without clothes before someone else and allow the belly to 'untuck' is one thing. To reveal yourself, with all your flaws, insecurities, past indiscretions, deep-seated desires and true views on intellectual matters as varied as whether Sponge Bob should get it on with Sandra and if you plan to pinch toilet paper from the bathroom at work and take home is another matter entirely.
When we slip on the Hanes, pull up the Levi's, button up the Versace's (or whatever brand is hot; I am fashionably very deficient), straighten our hair and wash the essence of intimacy from our hands, we bring redress to our physical selves. There is no zipping up the fly of mental nakedness and it is a very scary thing.
But without it the heady feeling from physical intimacy falls woefully short and extremes tend to be taken with sensitive extremities in order to keep the thrill, the 'vibe' (the vim, vigour, the vitality).
MARRIAGE IN THE AIR
Around Valentine's Day, too, marriage wafts in the air like the smell of KFC from close to Sunrise Supermarket on one side and the health on the other of the fowl outlet on Red Hills Road. Marriage is all well and good, but (and this is often said, but it bears repeating) the 'I dos' are not an end unto themselves. A wedding is a marker in a relationship, not an end unto itself.
The effort and expense put into the dress, the band of the bond ("where did you get your ring? Don't tell me....!!), the cake and the guest list are often not commensurate with the emphasis on the relationship. And I always say the bigger the wedding, the more disastrous the divorce. I will leave out the Jamaican examples (but oonu know dem an' a laugh, no true? Heh heh) and settle with Diana's move from the carriage to the speeding car.
And those who wish their relationship to last need to remember that unlike Valentine's Day 2006, which is now a memory, there is no such thing as the past in your partnership with your significant other. There is the present, the recent present and the sort of long ago present, but no past. Everything that we do from meeting that person until the next second in the progression of time has an impact on the relationship, on that mental nakedness for which there is no substitute.
That has nothing to do with February 14.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
