I don’t love Valentine’s Day. I don’t have anything against it per se. I love expressions of many kinds of love: eros, philia, ludus, agape, pragma, philautia, felinophilia. Here’s an article about different kinds of love. However, I generally don’t like to be told how and when I should express my affection. I didn’t force my child to give hugs. I don’t want my partner to feel obligated to give me flowers on a particular day. Valentine’s Day can be complicated.
St Valentine’s, Lupercalia, and The Bachelorette
The history and origin of St. Valentine’s Day are unclear. It may commemorate several different people or honor a death or burial. One plausible theory is that it is the co-opting of the pagan fertility festival of Lupercalia. [i] Lupercalia would not be PETA-approved. If televised, it would give the Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise intense competition as a bizarre romantic pairing reality show. I would not watch.
For many people, Valentine’s Day highlights the absence of a loving partnership. We have romanticized and even fetishized what that partnership means to the point that it is virtually unattainable. We make lists of must-haves and no-gos like we are going to the grocery store.
Problematic People
We set ourselves up for failure. Despite doing everything “right,” we occasionally meet, date, and/or marry highly problematic people. Sometimes, WE are highly problematic people. Most often, the combination of two people unleashes the dysfunction, rather than one person being fully to blame. Once we have a few decades under our belts, most of us have some relationship trauma. Valentine’s Day can be a communal and “fun” way to bring that to the surface.
Perfectionism
When we believe perfection is an attainable ideal, and having less is a personal failure or the failure of (fill in the blank) our parents, society, or the “system,” we are primed for disappointment. If the bar for success is not only perfection but someone else’s definition of perfection, we will constantly strive, hungry and dissatisfied. Everything good about the present is minimized; it is only a step toward a better or worse future. Every relationship ended, wrinkle added, or mistake made is a failure, becomes an undoing, a fall from grace, a diminishment.
Wabi-sabi
Wabi-sabi is a wise alternative path: the beauty of imperfection. Appreciating the time-worn, the impermanent, the aesthetic of the ancient. Wabi-sabi is not mass market and uniform, neither is it a constant striving for attention through uniqueness. It allows reality to be beautiful and imperfection to be interesting. Wabi-sabi teaches us to appreciate the differences that make us individuals: in nature, our bodies, how we express ourselves, and how we create and inhabit our surroundings.
Seeing perfection in imperfection may allow us to stick with salvageable relationships by working harder together to recognize and appreciate that neither we nor our partners are perfect. It helps us to be more accepting of ourselves and less likely to contort for others in unhealthy ways. This path makes distinguishing between unreasonable perfectionism and holding ourselves and others accountable to reasonable standards easier.
Breaking Up America
I am overtly talking about relationships and perfectionism, but as we segue into things falling apart, the context of when and where I am writing is relevant. Democracy in the USA is falling spectacularly, swiftly, and tragically apart. For half the country, we feel like we are going through a terrible breakup. Our truly sinister exes are vastly richer and seem more powerful than we are. These people have bought up everything we care about and are selling it out from under us. We are in a state of shock, figuring out the best ways to fight back, move forward, and care for ourselves and those we love. Love, loss, and trauma is relevant on multiple levels. (Also a shout out to people who let their perfectionism and not getting everything they want ruin something good for everyone! Thanks a lot.)
We are breaking up. We didn’t ask for the breaking apart. We worked to prevent the breaking apart. We will hopefully have an opportunity to reconstruct. Perhaps some of us say, “Hey, the breaking apart is all good; just relax, it’s ushering in the new era.” But the breaking apart is excruciating, and for some people it is a life and death issue. If we skip over that pain, we are spiritually bypassing at the very least. These “opportunities” for putting our lives back together inevitably take an enormous amount of work and long periods of time. They cost us financially, emotionally, physically, and in ways that are hard to measure. This applies to intimately personal situations and, specifically, to the dismantling of the United States’ laws, agencies, and partnerships that have kept us all safer to varying degrees.
Kintsugi
We are in the breaking apart phase, but we will be putting things back together at some point in the future. The Japanese art of kintsugi is a natural extension of the philosophy of wabi-sabi. The “15th-Century practice of kintsugi, meaning “to join with gold,” is a reminder to stay optimistic when things fall apart.”[i] Kintsugi involves putting broken ceramics back together using gold or other metals as the glue or adhesive. As an aesthetic and a metaphor for finding beauty in imperfection and strength after catastrophe, it does not try to hide the trauma of the cracks; it highlights them, transforms them, and elevates them without making everything about them. The teacup is still the teacup. The beauty of the gold now strengthens the weakness of the former cracks. It may not be better, but different and also lovely.
I hope you will find perfection in the imperfections of your life this Valentine’s Day. I also hope that together we will create a luminous substance to fill in the cracks of what is shattering around us in America, to make something new. Optimism may be hard to come by right now. We are still in the breaking apart phase. There will be an after. It may not be better, but different and also lovely.
Wishing you a peaceful heart,
Mara
I don’t love Valentine’s Day, but I love America.
[i] https://www.history.com/topics/valentines-day/history-of-valentines-day-2
[i] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210107-kintsugi-japans-ancient-art-of-embracing-imperfection