Caroline O'Donoghue: 'I pledged that Valentine’s Day is not for me'

I’m reading a lovely book at the moment called ‘Little Weirds’ by Jenny Slate, and in it, she expresses a desire to be loved on Valentine’s Day. 

“I am tired of having to hold my breath through Valentine’s Day the way you do when you drive past a graveyard,” Slate writes. “I want a valentine from a normal person who is horny. I want a prize for how well I can love. I want to be a prize for love.” 

Slate is writing this from the perspective of a divorced woman who is coming to terms with being alone. I am not a divorced woman. I have been in a happy monogamous relationship for seven years. This means that I started the relationship as a young woman, and while I am still somewhat young, I am not the kind of young I used to be: the kind of young where you insist you are not like other girls, that you do not need what they need, do not want the things they want. 

It’s the myth of the Cool Girl all over again: the easygoing, sexy chick who does not exist and yet whose spectre often ruins the lives of women who do. As part of this Cool Girl routine, I have pledged again and again that Valentine’s Day is not for me. And I believed myself! I actively pledged myself against presents, against fuss, against flowers. I was not alone. All the other women of my generation have done this. I can’t believe how stupid we’ve all been. We are love’s equivalent of citizens who vote against their own interest. We are the coal miners who vote for billionaires to pay less taxes.

I started this absurd routine with my teenage boyfriends, something I always had too many of. I was a serial monogamist from a very young age. You can attribute this to many things – a youngest child’s plea for attention, a hot-blooded teenager’s desire to be touched – but I actually think it’s my sister’s fault. She is ten years older than me, and we shared a wall for many years, and so I often fell asleep to the sound of her watching The X-Files on her little VCR television. I was too scared of the show to watch it myself, but the theme tune sunk into my brain, the eerie whistling sound chilling my child bones. I remember looking out my window, convinced I was about to be abducted. I remember thinking to myself, over and over: when I am married, I will have a big bed, and I will make my husband sleep near the window, and when the aliens come they will not abduct us because they will be too scared of my huge man.

I can’t tell if I was over-estimating the strength of men or underestimating the power of aliens, or perhaps a little of both, but this was the founding theory on which I shaped my romantic life.

I had one boyfriend who wasn’t very nice but his family were. I adored them. One Valentine’s Day, I was over at his house and we were both ranting with equal fervour about the tacky, idiotic, crass commercialism of Valentine’s Day. We were being sixteen, in short. Later that evening his father came home with a bunch of red roses for his mother, and a single red rose in a plastic case for me. “Just in case,’ he said softly, shooting a dirty look at his son for not doing this himself. “You change your mind.” I took the red rose home and kept it in a vase in my room until all the petals fell off.

And yet, I refused to let up. For years, and years, right into adulthood. I still needed to be a girl who hates Valentine’s Day, because I wanted to be loved by the boys who hate Valentine’s Day, because Valentine’s Day is a day when things are expected of them. Hating it as a girl is your way of insisting “look how tiny I can be! I fold away and fit right in your luggage!” I got so good at hating Valentine’s Day that I didn’t even notice its coming or going, until I was sitting on the train late at night and locking eyes with a girl whose arms were overflowing with blooms.

Let’s zoom out, and forget about stupid old self-pitying me for a second, and instead look at Gavin, a man who is with a woman who has convinced herself she hates Valentine’s Day when what she really hates is the prospect of being disappointed or being too much trouble. Yes, it’s a crass commercial holiday, but there really aren’t that many of them, when you think about it. Maybe if we had put a robust Valentine’s Day government in place seven years ago then we wouldn’t be confused and forgetful every February 14th; maybe I would present him with poems and cashmere.

Poems that say: Everytime I see the dog shuffling around on the carpet, dragging her bed on top of the hot water pipe, laying her head on the easy warm luxury that she both has and hasn’t had to work for, I think about being in love with you. I think about how you’re always there and all I ever need to do is drag my little bed over.

I light a pyre for the Cool Girl who never existed but who routinely ruins the life of women who do. This weekend I am going to buy the most expensive bottle of wine I can find and be a prize for love.