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Meandering on the path to true love

Oh to be in Whistler now that Valentine’s Day is near. I don’t know anyone who won’t admit to being just the tiniest bit ambivalent about Valentine’s Day.
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Oh to be in Whistler now that Valentine’s Day is near.

I don’t know anyone who won’t admit to being just the tiniest bit ambivalent about Valentine’s Day. Straight, gay, happily ensconced in a long term relationship or on the prowl, Valentine’s Day is a time to wallow in the grab bag of mixed emotions, the highs and lows, the slides up and down and the tumbledry passages in between, that are affairs of the heart. Amorè.

All we need, according to St. John, is love. But love is life’s big lottery. It’s easy to play and hard to win. Harder still in a town such as this where, if you’re a guy, you stumble into any relationship with the heavy burden of proving you’re not a hopeless ski bum, a Peter Pan, a substance-abusing jerk looking for a quick lay, or a closet conservative. Ironically, the harder you try to overcome that burden, the more you prove the point. QED, dude.

But don’t take heart, girls. Your path to true love’s even harder. Though mathematically, at least in this town, you’re on the winning end of the lottery, you’ve probably spent way too much of your life being brainwashed into believing whatever you have isn’t quite good enough. Ouch! Too harsh? Then what is it exactly keeping the whole Cosmo, beauty-care, esthetics, eating-disorder, self-help juggernaut in business? And if you’ve thrown off the shackles of that guilt trip, let us not forget the rallying cry of ski town girls everywhere: The odds may be good but the goods are definitely odd.

Let’s be honest. Who among us has wandered the path of love in an unwavering, sober line, a true course, a Saskatchewan highway? Chances are better than rain in October your personal path of love looks more like the meandering of a blind dog sniffing his way through a Whistler neighborhood, a strong scent here, a weak scent there, memories of old friends and vicious fights and finally, hopefully, a loving mate and maybe a warm home.

Valentine’s Day for me was, and to some extent still is, a time of fear and loathing. Somehow, organically, a twisted bit of rogue DNA made me prone to affairs of the heart at a tender age. Had the words sexual and harassment been linked during my childhood, those many years ago, I probably would have been shipped off to a reform school kindergarten.

I rarely met a five-year-old girl incapable of turning my head. At milk break I would jealously guard the squatting spots on both sides of me. The right side – the side of my heart – was for my amour du jour; the left, for my amour du tomorrow. I was fickle but evenhanded; I truly believed I had a heart big enough for every girl in my class. I played the field long before I understood the game.

In those early school years, Valentine’s Day was a puzzling challenge for me. Surely I had to spread my amorous intentions liberally – but not equally – around the classroom. This required a hierarchy of Valentines reaching proportions so complicated, it should have presaged a career in government or some other pyramid game.

Naturally, my teacher – inevitably a woman in those days – required the biggest, suckiest Valentine I could find. Not overtly romantic but sufficiently suggestive to let her know at least one younger man thought she was hot stuff. Even then, I knew which side of the toast to butter.

In order of affection, generally based on whether she was an ex or a future love, every girl in the class received a Valentine. Each in turn opened their little envelope to find a less romantic or humorous or personal one than the girl higher up the scale of my fickle pecking order. If the best Valentines carried messages worthy of a young Cyrano de Bergerac, the last in line sounded more like they may have come from the school nurse: "Be healthy," signed probably with only an initial, not even my whole name.

Clearly, this level of romance couldn’t be sustained. After an emotional hurricane, culminating in the breaking of my engagement at the age of 7 – I had by that time become quite, if only serially, monogamous – I swore off girls, repressed any thoughts of love and Valentines, and threw myself, body and soul, into long division.

The precision of math comforted me. There were no quirks, no foibles, no passing fancies, just the occasional infinitely repeating remainder to make me wonder about the mysteries of the universe. And of course, enigmatic Pi, the Holy Grail of the numerate. Unknowable, unattainable, Pi became the metaphor of romantic love throughout the difficult adolescent years, 7 to 22 in my case.

But it couldn’t last. The passion of my youth and the hormones of adolescence, helped along greatly by the sexual revolution, spun me firmly into the camp of love once again. On reflection, love may be too Victorian a word for what went on during those years. Romantic love was largely replaced by sexual gymnastics, often fueled by illegal substances, anonymity and group dynamics. It may have been love but it surely wasn’t anything you could capture in a Valentine.

Age, and the spectre of social diseases that eat penicillin like steroids, fortunately conspired to put an end to those wham-bam years. Lust, like leisure suits, was confined to the back of my closet. Romantic love found root in the conservative backlash of the ’80s. But Valentine’s Day never got any easier.

Valentine’s Day will never get any easier. It carries with it a performance pressure that guarantees eventual failure. If divine intervention strikes and a brilliant assemblage of words, gifts and atmosphere converge to form an indelible love loop in the romantic memory of your heart, where do you go from there? What can you do that’s better than you’ve done in the past?

If you’re more hopeless than romantic, you might drift through life avoiding this uncomfortable reality by trading utility vehicles for little red sports cars, old spouses for new. Start the cycle all over again and use the same ideas, worry like hell that sooner or later, you’ll not only run out of ideas but someone you can fool into falling for them.

Or, if you’re lucky, you might find your Perfect Partner. If you do, every day is Valentine’s Day and February 14th is just the middle of the shortest month of the year. My Perfect Partner and I will celebrate Tuesday. We’ll eat something chocolate – not because it’s Valentine’s Day, but because it’s one of our basic food groups – and do something wild, crazy and unexpected. Assuming, that is, one of us can think of something between now and then we haven’t done before.

Oh, the pressure.