All you need is...

Love?

A zero score in tennis – from the French l’oeuf, “the egg” – or the keynote of the St Valentine’s Day celebrations. Depending on your point of view.

There are cards and red envelopes everywhere. Chocolates. Champagne or rather, something cheaper, fizzy wine. The local restaurants have been taking bookings since New Year – tables for two, candles at no extra charge. Menus groan under the weight of sensuality. Tender chicken breast. Juicy rump steak. Whipped mousse, whipped cream, whipped paté on fingertip-thin toast. And oysters - lobster – artichokes – asparagus – dark chocolate – passionfruit - the ubiquitous edible signifiers of physical congress spread out before us with all the sense of expectation of a waiting, unoccupied honeymoon suite. The polished mahogany of the tables conceals itself beneath the starched damask of tablecloths and napkins, the sense of occasion neatly sliced and defined by the heaviness of the silver cutlery. All around the country, on 14th February, couples will fulfil their arrangements, pull up their chairs, take their places opposite each other for an evening of overindulged excess. Later, sated, they will adjourn to bedrooms or suites – at home or in hotels – for the pre-planned, pre-packaged meetings with an agenda of pleasure. Chocolates artfully pushed aside from the pillow. One last glass of wine on the bedside table. The lights dimmed… something atmospherically unchallenging playing on the stereo, the volume low…

And maybe there’s nothing wrong with it. Maybe, with life being so busy nowadays, that’s just what we have to do: we have to prearrange it all, this romance, this passion – prearrange it even if it means that we all end up celebrating our love in one identikit packaged, shrink-wrapped night. Just get it organised – accept it and enjoy it – don’t think about it too much. And yet… something about that prearranged perfection, if I’m out somewhere on Valentine’s night, makes me want to pick a fight, or to see other people let rip in the true and real satisfaction of a good, honest argument. Not the twee ditziness of a lovers’ tiff with its quick-fix subtext – a proper, full-blown, expletive-hurling, arm-waving row. The kind of row which would breathe a fresh breeze through the sultry claustrophobia of enforced romantic perfection in the way that a really good thunderstorm freshens up the most unbearably oppressive summer afternoon. Just one row would refresh the whole setting, as the evidence of the real interaction between people, of the actual dynamic of courtship or of life with another. Life as a half – an other half. Because that’s the language of Valentine’s day. Until we fall in love, we’re people: lonely, alone, whole. Then we meet someone and we become, if we’re really lucky, somebody’s “other half”, and suddenly, we’re just that: halves of a whole. Defined less by what we’re like than by whom we like and, all importantly, by who likes us, as though we’re the subject of some kind of interpersonal customer satisfaction survey. He loves me; he loves me not; he’s met someone thinner, funnier, prettier, cleverer, sexier, nicer…

And somehow, the red envelopes and the glossy cards and the ribboned gifts and the flirtatious texts and the damask tablecloths are supposed to encapsulate all of this – deep amid the February frosts and the tirednesses of wintertime. No matter who we are, or how we feel, or who we feel that for – these things are somehow supposed to capture it all for all of us. All the happiness, the sadness, the pain, the joy, the certainties, the doubts, the predictability and the repetitive hope of being able to be still surprised – the whole complex mess of love, of loving, universalised into a marketing strategy. And maybe it works. Maybe the very thing about the Valentine’s rack in your local card shop is that nothing there will actually succeed in summing it up for you – or for anyone else. Perhaps the very point of Valentine’s day is the effort made by embarrassed boyfriends or husbands sidling into shops selling perfume or handmade chocolates or lingerie, as opposed to the identity of the chosen gift itself, and whether or not it’s exactly what the loved person really wanted. And yet…

… and yet I can’t help wondering about it. This year, a few weeks before that satin-hearted date, I was in a local card shop where I noticed, among the expected array of the twee, the suggestive, the obscene, the cute and the euphemistic, a few early-blooming Valentines which really made me pause: “Happy Valentine’s Day to the cat”; “Happy Valentine’s Day from the dog”; “Happy Valentine’s Day to Mummy from her special little boy.” What glorious excess of trans-genus, trans-generational romance was going on here? What would a cat do with a card; how would a dog buy one; what would Freud have said? I could feel laughter struggling with outrage in my mind as I left the shop before my reactions became public or inappropriate. And if we lay aside the jokes of litter-trays or barking or Oedipal fantasy, isn’t this just – marketing? The shopping equivalent of that awful expression, “bums on seats”? It’s no longer enough to send one card, to one person, if we just happen to love one person; in the spirit of the world’s most cynical advertising refrain, transferred by the month from one company to another: “I want it all… and I want it now,” we now, it seems, have to greet almost everyone we know – including animals, for God’s sake - on this festival of crackling cellophane. Does this mean that we have the chance to show our friends, our family, our pets know we love them – not just our partner – or does it cheapen the whole concept of love itself by making it so general? Different kinds for different people, like an unending packet of Starburst sweets with an infinity of flavours reaching from the love of our lives to the dog, or a packet of lovehearts with an encased engraving for everyone we know?

And it’s all so terribly prescribed. They’ve worked out what’s romantic, the marketing men – what gets heartrates going, and what can prove our love. And it’s no imaginative leap. It’s underwear. Flowers. Chocolates. Champagne, cava – fizzy wine. A romantic compilation of middlebrow lovesongs. Perfume. Let’s say a girl has an ultra generous partner. Let’s say he buys her several items from this list – hell, maybe all of them. You see the problem? She eats the chocolates… then she won’t fit into the underwear, because he’ll probably have bought it a size too small as he’ll want her to feel good about herself: “Oh… he thinks I’m an 8, I must be looking good… I’ll not tell him I’m a 10… and actually, I’m not sure I still am, now that I’ve eaten all of those…”; she drinks the champagne /cava/ fizzy wine, and wakes up with a headache, which she comes to associate with him (and that’s at best, because maybe she thinks he’s trying to get her drunk to take advantage of her and reclaim a cynical little Valentine’s treat of his own?); she sees the flowers as a tribute to her beauty and then wonders, as she watches them wither, whether he looks at her and imagines her beauty withering, or his feelings for her fading; she listens to the music and a nausea of blandness adds itself to the headache; she spritzes on the perfume and thinks… doesn’t he like how I smell? Would he prefer I smelled like… Paris Hilton? Gwen Stefani? That woman from Sex and the City or – she squints in nauseated horror, temples throbbing, at the label and sees the terrible truth: he wants me to smell like… Coleen McLoughlin-Rooney???

And yet – maybe love is still something worth celebrating. Maybe in our world of wanting it all, wanting it now, the unselfish act of actually caring about somebody else is worth a fuss. “Valentine’s Day?” said a fortysomething acquaintance the other day, “that’s just for young people. I haven’t taken any notice of that for years.” Self-confessed cynic though I may be, I couldn’t help feeling bad for him, and for his wife. Although we can all laugh and suppress a shudder when we see that gloriously inappropriate moment in the denture-adhesive advert when the old people are kissing in the car, and we’re asked the horrifying question: “Which of these people is wearing dentures?” – whereas young lovers are undeniably more picturesque than old, surely love cannot be judged the preserve of the young alone. Surely it’s still all right to love someone when the decorative “spin” of being young has gone. And surely, too, it’s all right to celebrate that fact whenever, and however, you choose; whenever, and however fits the seriousness and the laughter between you, rather than as and when the gift shops and the card shops have decreed. Somehow, despite my professed standpoint of cynicism of these things, I think the primary school in England which has banned Valentine’s cards, so that the inevitable children who don’t receive any won’t have to deal with feelings of rejection, has got it dreadfully wrong. Having been that child, that teenager, for so long, I’d say that, not only did I survive the experience with only slight memories of residual embarrassment, I’m probably better for it: not having been the subject of a teenage crush made me more likely to be properly happy in adult life, I suspect… when I actually had the emotional wherewithal to do something other than daydream or write a nauseating verse. And anyway: we all have to go through rejection. Why not learn about it early, before it becomes too crushing? We can shelter our children from rejection for a while, but definitely not forever!

But who am I to judge. Who am I… beyond the person who has never received the anonymous tribute of a secret admirer, or breathed in the velvety, red optimism of an out-of-season rose, or heard the heartbeat thud as the letterbox releases a countable tribute of blushing desirability. The dramatised perfection of a thousand advertising strategies makes me feel mildly inadequate in these things. And yet I still hope that, when 14th February comes around again this year, there will be a moment of quiet thought and recognition of love, and friendship, and shared laughter, and support, and trust.

Of all we need.