Esther McCarthy: Valentine's Day is nonsense — real love is paying a grand to get the cat's leg chopped off
Esther McCarthy. Picture: Emily Quinn
“What a load of old SHIT.”
That’s a catchphrase from one of my very favourite comedic characters — Catherine Tate’s Old Nan — that succinctly sums up my feelings about Valentine’s Day.
Because it is, really, isn’t it? A steaming pile of Hallmark nonsense? It’s a crass commercialisation of emotion designed to make us send and receive teddy bears emblazoned with hearts and other unnecessary dust catchers, putting a monetary value on that most elusive of feelings.
It’s placing the price of something over the value of it. I love you this much! Flowers + finery + dinner + Durex = this is how much your affection is worth!
But real love isn’t an equation. It comes in so many forms, it’s a mercurial thing, often — I think you’ll agree with me here — confused with its saucy cousin, lust.
Real love should not be reduced to a petrified bunch of supermarket flowers, an overpriced dinner, and a sassy card. (Ralph Wiggum’s ‘I choo-choo-choose you’ card to Lisa Simpson with a train on front set up high expectations for a tween me, thus eliciting nought but sneer at any future sincere attempts at feelings expressed through cardboard. My V-day personal contract evolved to should no attempt at pun be made in the card, there shall explicitly be no saliva exchanged between the undersigned and the recipient.)
Anyway, as I matured, I realised love is experienced and expressed every day in a billion tiny different ways not just on a random day in February, and not just in a romantic context.
You can fiercely love the promise of someone who was never born, and you can forever love someone who’s no longer alive.
Sure, I used to think that love was all about the movie grand gestures; the frantic rush to the airport to stop the flight and earnestly overshare over the Tannoy; the gift of a little box with the keys to a Lamborghini parked outside wrapped up in bow; skywriting your pet names for each other while having a picnic in the park, sitting on a blankie hand crocheted by granmama, and eating heart-shaped cupcakes sickly in both flavour and fervour.
Or one could be impressed by the romantic gestures throughout history.
Did you know that Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan was so smitten with his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal (the poor woman bore him 14 children!), that when she died giving birth to their last child, he built her the most extra tomb ever, aka the Taj Mahal.
Construction took over 20 years because apparently widowery grief = elaborate architecture.
I’d say she’d have preferred a vasectomy and a nice cup of tea in bed, but too late for that.
And what about the king who gave up a throne for a woman?
Edward VIII was king for a mere 11 months when he fell crown over heels for Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American socialite.
The Church of England was all like, “You can’t marry a divorcee!” And the prime minister was all like, “You can’t marry an American!”
And the people were all like, “You can’t marry someone who’s not royal!” But Edward’s heart (and possibly his penis) wanted what it wanted.
He was all like, “Love conquers all, even the British Empire!” And didn’t he abdicate, marry Wallis, and disrupt the entire system while he was at it.
- Love is... your teenager putting the fluffy blanket over the dog every night before he goes to bed.
- Love is... seeing the diesel has been filled up in the car because your husband knows your neck is at you and holding the nozzle in the cold makes it act up.
- Love is... pretending you are fascinated by a new map in a computer game just so you can watch your kid’s face light up with the excitement of explaining it to you. (Caveat: This love can be fleeting and fickle, depending on the jobs needing doing, and the size of the map.)
- Love is... paying nearly a thousand euro to get the cat’s leg amputated because you know how much the five-year-old adores him. Fiscal fear is briefly weighing up what the odds are that said five-year-old would notice if you swapped the unfortunate cat for another tabby and told him the leg magically healed itself. Love is counting out the fifties through clenched teeth and blurry eyes and pretending to the five-year-old that your tears are those of joy that Leo the cat will live to fight another day, albeit lopsidedly.
- Love is... in the milliseconds between the picking up the phone to text someone, and the remembering, oh! they’re not here any more, and having to readjust your reality again and again to make the world make sense without them in it. Love lives in the little creases of all our lives, it makes us better, and we don’t need one day in February designed to make us flitter money to celebrate it. We honour it every day, in a million tiny little miracles.
Saying that, a box of nice chocolates never goes astray.
