Romance vs. Ritual

The human heart is an unruly little critter. It never quite does what you expect. Here it is, Valentine’s Day weekend; you’d think it would get with the program. But no. Love must dance to its own drummer. Really. I read it on a valentine.

Valentine wisdom, of course, is never there when you need it, as we do now, watching the teenager shuffle around the house. When she is sad, her little mouth actually turns down at the corners, a condition we can see clearly because, incredibly, someone has managed to detach the phone from her head.

This absence of apparatus makes her look vaguely alien and naked, like the despondent Van Gogh without his ear.

“What’s wrong?” we ask.

“Nothing.” Uh-oh. Her voice is barely a whisper. This can only be heartache. I scan my mind for preemptive words of wisdom, but all I can think of is my grandmother’s all-purpose advice to the lovelorn: “Keep lookin’. There’s a lid for every pot.”

This adage smacks too much of housework to get the teenager’s attention. Also, she has a lid, as it were. She got her first boyfriend a few weeks ago. An extremely cute and nice boyfriend. A boyfriend who plays sports and goes to church. A boyfriend who greets her dad with, “Good evening, sir.”

This should invoke feelings that are the opposite of heartache, and indeed it does. But it is also new territory, and new territory never looks quite like you expect.

“Is this about Valentine’s Day?” we venture.

“Kind of,” she sighs. Then out it spills, a stretch of landscape that has been there for time eternal: the battle-of-the-sexes heartache that strikes when boyfriends come between girls.

“All the girls who don’t have boyfriends this year are all going to meet for a Valentine’s night out,” she says. “They’re going to dress in black and go out to dinner. They’re going to have a whole lot of fun.

“Last year I heard some kids did it and it was really great. So I asked if I could go too. But I guess girls with boyfriends aren’t allowed.”

“Well that’s kinda dumb,” my husband opines. Which it is, the way Valentine’s Day itself is kinda dumb, expecting as it does the heart to just up and fall in line. We know these girls. We’ve watched them chow down pizza and try on each others’ clothes. We’re pretty sure they can’t be anywhere near as battle-scarred by heartbreak as this wake of junior bachelorettes would imply.

But Valentine’s Day is about getting with the program, and part of the program is that you take your romance--or lack thereof--verrry seriously.

“Don’t you have, ahem, a date anyway?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she sighs in confusion. “He says he wants to name a star after me.”

*

Back when I was single, Valentine’s Day used to be my nemesis, right up there with New Year’s Eve. Year after year, I let myself get sucked into believing that big, romantic things were going to happen to me because this was supposed to be a big, romantic day.

But it never worked out. Either I wouldn’t be dating anyone that year, or if I was, he wasn’t the romantic type. Or if he was, I wasn’t that interested, so I felt pressure instead of romance. Or if I was interested, one of us would have to work.

Pretty soon, I gave up on the valentines, if not on the romance, and pretty soon after that, I married my husband, and Valentine’s Day became to me what it is to most married people: moot. Now when I think of valentines, I just remember I’m not supposed to buy them for our first-grader’s classmates because her teachers see them as another way for the more serious kids’ feelings to get hurt.

If I were single and reading this, I’d think, “Easy for you to look down your nose at this perfectly fine holiday. You’ve found the lid to your pot.” But thinking back, I regret the time I spent pining for the obligatory hearts and flowers, imagining that love was a dance that wasn’t real unless it was choreographed.

What I didn’t know then was how little love would have to do with obligation, how utterly, goofily unchoreographable it would be when it finally danced my way. I think it’s a pretty good question when, finally, the teenager sinks into the couch and murmurs: “Why does everything all of a sudden have to be so serious?”

It doesn’t, we tell her. Spend Feb. 14 any way that you like. There are feelings and then there are rituals; they’re not the same. Don’t waste a single moment second-guessing the miracle of your true emotions. Don’t confuse the rush of youth and fun and friendship with a conspiracy to sell heart-shaped cards.

Our words sound like the text of some New Age valentine, a valentine from a couple of geezers whom no teenager would want to picture in the same frame with the thought of romantic love. Nonetheless, she smiles. She can’t help it, we guess. Her heart is an unruly little critter. It never does what she expects.

*

Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com