Most of us can pin point it to a moment, or at the very least, a day: That fold in time when we realize that we have fallen in love; when what matters the most in our day-by-day existence is the happiness of someone else.
Because their happiness is your happiness. And you trust that your happiness is their happiness, too.
Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and I am not in love.
I haven’t been in love since I was 17. Nearly five years ago, when I should have been five-years-less-mature.
Five-years-less-emotionally-available.
Five-years-less-sexually-experienced.
I fell in love with a 20-year-old who called me Swan and bought me my first iPod. We’d talk on the phone for an hour every night and mail one another hand written love letters and mixed CDs.
For Valentine’s Day I bought him a Build-A-Bear with my voice installed in it saying “I love you.”
Ew. Gag me.
It’s obvious that five years later, I feel just the opposite. I’m not into extravagant shows of affection. Now I would kick a guy who called me Swan. And honestly, what boy wants a Build-A-Bear, anyway?
Five Valentine’s Day later, I feel different in other ways, too. I feel hesitant to make eye contact with members of the opposite sex I’m attracted to. I’m frightened to confront boys about my own feelings.
I call my mom for advice because I don’t know what to do when my heart runs amuck and two hours later, I’ve listened to the Sarah McLachlan, Fiona Apple and John Mayer CDs.
I am more a little girl in the game of love than when I was a senior in high school.
Maybe it’s because I have friends who are married. I have friends with children. I have friends who are pregnant with children, and I have friends who are talking about having children.
At 22, falling in love isn’t a game of text-and-go-seek. Falling in love is serious business and much more permanent. It can be beautiful or it can tear you up inside and leave you scarred for longer than you’d like to admit. We are mature. We are adults. We should get over lost cases of lost love. But we can’t and we won’t. So we don’t.
We retain feelings of hopelessness and despair because we think that there is no other chance to feel that way again. That we have one ticket, one chance and one hope to meet, fall in love, and make some semblance of “together-forever-until-we-die” promise to one another.
Maybe that’s why I refuse to fall in love. Because I’m frightened that I’ll feel indebted to that affection.
That if I hadn’t broken up with the only person I’d ever loved, that five more Valentine’s Days would have passed and I’d still be buying him Build-A-Bears.
Maybe I’m not so immature after all.
*posted by Sammy D
