by Justin Surgent

At this point, the day has passed. The 24 hour span of true love all romantics dream of year-long is over, and the heart shaped boxes of sweets are now half-priced, making room on the shelves for chocolate bunnies and Cadbury eggs. After you’ve awoken from your glucose-induced coma brought forth from the three pounds of Lindt truffles you ate last night, it will be back to the unromantic grindstone of everyday life.

Valentine’s Day is over, and what do you have to show for it?

Perhaps you asked out, or were asked out by, the quiet crush love of your life. Perhaps you then had an amazing date, which included a fancy rooftop dinner, expensive wine and whatever else Hollywood rom-coms tell us true love tastes like. The world became yours, and you walked off into the sunset-background credits, accepting true love for life and laughing as a pop-indie song played in the background, forever.

However, for the rest of us, we woke up next to a half eaten box of chocolates our mothers sent us and a bottle of wine, or three, that we bought ourselves. And chances are, half that chocolate melted underneath our sleeping carcasses resulting in the closest thing to intimacy we felt all night. The sun has set and risen again, and we have 364 days until the next chance to find the love of our lives, and the single world breaths a collective sigh.

But that’s completely wrong.

I’ve lived through plenty of Valentine’s days (22, to be exact), with mixed results in all. I’ve awoken to find stereotypical gifts from my mother stating I was her Valentine, to exchanging chocolates and stuffed objects with a romantic interest, to receiving some downright creepy Valentine’s day cards signed anonymously. And regardless of how much sugar, cuteness or unrequited love I’ve received and given on this day each year, I’ve always hated it because, romance aside, actual love is forgotten.

I’m not talking about romantic love -the kind we see everyday on T.V.- telling us what happiness is, or the “love” you feel for the cute person you sit behind in your largest lecture class and only reach out to via UMass Flirts. I’m talking about the love we see, feel and exchange everyday that’s never mentioned. I’m referring to the people you see daily that you cannot live without, but you might not yet realize how important they are. I’m referring to your friends.

This Valentine’s day, I had no romance in my life. I had no one to buy a politically correct stuffed bear and sappy card for, no one to send chocolate or flowers to, and no one to take to an overpriced dinner downtown. But that doesn’t mean I lived a life without love.

In fact, I love a lot of people, and I’m scared to death to leave them all in three months for good. So maybe it’s taken me until this point to realize, Valentine’s Day is a load of crap, but not from the point of view of a single and bitter 20-something mad he had no date.

Heartbroken and healed, this Valentine’s Day I took the chance to celebrate some of the love in my life that truly matters; the friends that I love. Romance is wonderful, but the friends I have, a few in particular, have been the people to take me out, get my mind off this semester’s heartbreak, then pick up the empty wine bottles after the romantic fallout subsides.

Romantic love is fleeting. It’s always powerful, taking me by surprise and showing me that my cold and small Grinch-sized-heart can in fact grow three sizes for the right girl, but usually only for a few months at a time. After the initial burst of emotion, it cools down slowly as we lose interest in one another, break each other’s hearts, and move on with our lives. And if that’s love, it sure isn’t true, at least in the Hollywood sense, and I’m honestly not sure it’s worth celebrating. If that’s that love that Feb. 14th drives me to commemorate, I’d rather skip the day altogether and bring winter one day closer to spring. But it’s that awful love that has shown me the same people have been there through-and-through, each time.

This year I came to the age-old conclusion that the love Valentine’s Day projects is completely fabricated. It’s fleeting, it’s commercial and it’s Hollywood. Life doesn’t end happily ever after, because then there would be no reason for an epilogue or a sequel. Your entire existence doesn’t end the minute you’re happy for more than ten minutes to the sound of sappy love songs, or else happy-ever-after would be a nightmare for anyone looking for something more meaningful in life than to end it with a list of credits. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still celebrate love.

It’s my friends who sat there and listened to me rant for hours on an empty heartbreak, or gave feedback on sad poems, songs, or whatever else I was doing that week to try to get past that fleeting and tumultuous thing called “romance.” And chances are, if you’re single, it was your friends in similar positions who listened to you mope about the pains of love and the meaninglessness of Valentine’s Day all evening on Feb. 14th over a six pack while you tried to digest the true meaning of your singularity.

Once Feb. 14th rolls around again, if you’re single and feeling the need to partake in America’s favorite commercialized love-fest, keep in mind what love really is. Because, just as an anatomically correct heart looks nothing like the cookie-cutter shapes we post around mid Feb., the meaningful love in your life may lack the romance and gaudy gift exchange we associate with romance. It may be hidden, unromantically and strictly platonic, in the friend who knows to come over at 3am with a few beers and a shoulder to cry on after your romantic endeavors have failed yet again at the price of a Hallmark card and box of chocolates.

So next year, don’t kill the holiday off completely. The idea is great, just the practice is cluttered. Keep in mind that love is real, but it doesn’t always look like it does in the movies. Sometimes it comes in the form of a friend with six cans of PBR and a coffee to stay awake through your problems.

Maybe they’ll even bring chocolates.

 Justin Surgent can be reached at [email protected]