Cards For Love And Other Feelings
Hi everyone,
Every year around this time, I can’t help but reflect on all the thoughts and feelings (oh, feelings) that Valentine’s Day stirs up for me and others whose love lives might be better portrayed by a long string of expletives than dancing hearts. Even now, I’m still not sure where to draw the line between like and love, between infatuation and love, between platonic love and non-platonic love, between love and not-lonely, between loving someone and being in love with them, and if you can draw such lines at all.
Last year I wrote about why I give valentines even though I hate Valentine’s Day. For Valentine’s Day this year, I’m launching a new collection of Cards For Love and Other Feelings, for those of us who need something different than what the CVS card aisle can offer.
In Hollywood movies, love is actually quite a consistent story: Boy meets girl. Something keeps them apart. They get over it, declare their Love (burning, passionate, capital-L, you-had-me-at-hello love), and then they live happily ever after off-screen. Hallmark apparently agrees, with their line after line of pink-and-red cards with declarations like “You Complete Me” and “I Love You More Than Ever” and “You’re Mine & I’m Yours.” Seriously.
I mean, no wonder I’ve done my share of keeping the wine industry in business trying to figure out where I went so wrong that I haven’t yet landed the perfect man who looks like Ryan Gosling but doesn’t know it, and who acts like Colin Firth in basically any movie he’s been in. This, in spite of the fact that I know this is not how real life works.
In real life, love looks and acts and feels differently for everyone. Sometimes boy meets boy or girl meets girl. Sometimes girl meets boy, but boy is already with someone else. Or boy leaves girl in hopes of meeting someone “better” but then regrets it and then obsessively goes on Tinder dates.
Or boy messages boy online but then doesn’t respond to boy’s reply, leaving boy to wonder what he did or didn’t say and if he’s fundamentally unlovable. Or girl likes boy but he likes another girl so she dates another boy because he’s nice even though she secretly still Facebook stalks photos of the first boy who seems irritatingly happy with the other girl, but who knows really.
In some ways, this is wonderful and liberating. In a lot of ways, this is progress. We have so much more freedom to write our own love stories, even if they don’t make much sense to anyone else or to ourselves. We can date boys, or girls, or both (at least more than we used to). We can be in relationships with more than one person at once. We can have sex without getting married first.
Hell, we don’t even have to know each other’s first names. We can “hang out” indefinitely. We can live together after knowing each other for a few weeks. Or share a life without any formal commitment. We can choose to not be with anyone at all. It’s kind of great, and also really confusing and complicated. Because without a script that we need to follow, we have to do the work to figure out what and who we want. And that’s hard.
As with most things, I’m still figuring this whole love thing out. Which makes it a little laughable that I’m making cards for other people to give on Valentine’s Day. But in any case, here are cards for those of us with achy hearts and a fear of using the L-word, who vacillate between being happily single and desperately lonely, who can’t quite reconcile our need for independence and desire to be taken care of, who don’t have a good answer for the question.
“So how do you two know each other?”, and who slog through the endless internet parade of mirror selfies and “hey wsup” messages with the hope that there is someone out there who will like us just the way we are, who have a lot of feelings but don’t quite know what they are. And that’s perfectly ok.
xo,
Janine