Valentines sucks, anybody will tell you. It’s a holiday people love to hate. A commercial scam taking advantage of people’s affection for each other say the cynics, an obnoxious Grand PDA day to all the lonely hearts, and the happy couples (if there are any) don’t need an excuse to do something special anyway. I gotta say though, I was looking forward to V-Day 2009. I don’t necessarily have anything against the day itself, persay… I just never had much use for it. Even in a relationship, it was usually the occasion for disaster. 3 years ago it was on a Valentines Day date with ま. that I finally realized that I didn’t love her, and hadn’t for quite some time. Thus began the longest breakup of my life. V-Days after that have come and gone without much of anything, whether I was involved or not. This year, however, I had a plan. I hadn’t been seeing じぇ. for long. Hell, I’m still fresh off the boat here, but things had been going reasonably well. Witty banter – we had it by the bucketfull. Dates – roughly 7-10. We slept together – twice! She charmed the pants off me by inviting me to a Valentines Day strip club party with a bunch of her friends – “Meat Curtains and Skirt Steak,” she said. Ha. She has a roommate in a small place, and I live with my mom, so I thought I’d take the liberty of getting us a cozy place to spend the evening, after we’d oogled, quaffed and chowed our way through a fantastic night at the Acrop. I booked a charming room at the White Eagle “Rock & Roll Hotel,” bought some fine whiskey and nice chocolates. I was set. It was gonna be a surprise, but after seeing her the other night and being in kind of a “meh” mood, I thought I’d try and get some points back by blowing the whistle on my Valentines Day plans early. I also admit that I was worried about looking like a creep for booking a hotel without asking her. But hey, we’d already slept together right? I figured this was just thinking ahead. For once, here I was looking forward to a Valentines Day. I had a girl, I had a plan, I had a big new 12 pack of rubbers and a hotel room.

The problem with this year’s V-Day is that it follows Friday the 13th. I supppose I should have seen it coming, but I’ll admit I was blindsided. I’m watching movies with poor ひ. who just broke her wrist up at the mountain, I go check my email and find I’ve been unceremoniously dumped. BY EMAIL. The reasons are unclear. She’s trying to be cute about it, I can see that. Hoping to get it early, avoid something dramatic. Hell, the subject line was “Better Now then [sic] Later.” She cited the hotel thing as “Too early,” and said she wasn’t feeling the “couple thing rearing its ugly head.”

I’m not a person accustomed to rejection. Sure, that sounds arrogant. It is. Let’s just be honest. I’m a young, attractive, well-traveled musician and writer (read-“sensitive”). I’ve got a reasonable amount of social game. I’m not bragging, just taking stock of what I have going in my favor; we’ll come to the rest later. Typically, I have trouble with too much interest from girls, rather than not enough. Greedy little bastard that I am, the hardest lesson in my love life has been learning to refuse others, even when I’m loathe to hurt them doing it. Being on the receiving end of the rejection tip… it’s happened to me before, it’s never easy, but mostly it’s just something I have far less experience at dealing with. It would be easy to just write じぇ. off and be done with it. “She’s a guarded, immature, emotional coward who will do anything to avoid seriously caring for someone or being cared for.” The sentence has been stewing in my brain since I read the faux-cute “still friends?” closer to her email. It’s nice to judge someone who rejects you, comforting. It’s not even unfair, necessarily, it’s just one-sided. It is, however, for me, inadequate. Even if the above is actually true, it goes without saying that everyone has such a sentence that can easily be composed about them by someone who has dated or is dating them. What has been eating at me is the complete, encyclopedic knowledge of everything I did wrong, and why I did it wrong.

I divulged too much about myself too early.
I was overly eager, I tried to get too close too fast.
I second guessed myself, and confused her by not knowing what I should say.
When in doubt, I shut up, which made me seem quiet or boring.
I was sub-par in the sac (for myself, at any rate, it’s hard for me to know her standards).

There is a more specific list. One full of specific incidents, things I said or did, but don’t worry, I’m not going to bog us in that kind of triviality here. Even in the above “general” list, it’s clear that I screwed things up because I liked her. Really liking someone doesn’t happen that often. It makes you nervous when it does. When you’re nervous, you make mistakes. It’s that simple. The universally cruel irony of love a la Rolling Stones: “You can’t always get what you want… but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.”

The women you want will evade you, toy with you, treat you wrong, and then finally, leave you. But even worse than this is knowing that those women you need, the women who have treated you right, who have been there for you and done everything they could for you, you will evade these women. You will toy with them, treat them wrong, and then finally, leave them. If you’re a female reading this, just reverse the pronouns/genders, it’s the same either way. If anything, Valentines Day makes me wonder, like so many before me, what kind of absolute fucking MORON wrote “the book of love” … what all powerful creator decided on these rules of attraction? Or from the scientific view, how in the fuck is this evolutionarily productive/advantageous? Why are humans so totally f’d up? And more importantly, on this Valentines 2009, why in the everloving fuck should I (or anyone) go out and celebrate this abomination instead of staying home and watching more Battlestar Galactica?

So say we all.