Valentine's Day

 Written 1 February, 2008

Valentine’s Day

This blog is a collaborative effort between Cheyenne and Sweetie. Cheyenne typed while Sweetie dictated.

Sweetie thinks the above statement makes her look like a whining, dictating, creative autocrat. I won’t tell you what she said when I told her I wrote the above sentence.

Once again there’s a strange buzz in the air. There’s an electric hum on top of the electronic hum of our excited electron world. What is it, you ask? It’s the white noise of love.

It’s the sound of a million silent IMs buzzing through the ether in Second Life. It’s the subtle pressures and joys of Valentine’s Day’s approach.

Here in America, at least, Valentine’s Day is an odd thing. No matter how unaffected you pretend to be, if you’re single, there’s a lot of jockeying going on to make sure you’ll have friends around that day or activities planned for that day or a date to keep you busy. You have to be with someone or proudly alone. Being melancholy on Valentine’s Day just isn’t cool.

That pressure, somehow, combined with the doldrums after the holidays, means that the holiday of love results in a lot of couples fighting, and a lot of couples breaking up.

Sometimes the blowout is caused by the pressure to commit and make a grand statement, declaring eternal love to our new flight of fancy.

In the best of cases, this cements the relationship and makes it stronger when everyone kisses and makes up. The rest of the time, it means newly-minted heartache and singleness for the holiday.

To our dear friends in real life and Second Life who are struggling right now, going through breakups, and to our friends in the blush of new love, Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to enjoy the people who are special in their lives.

Second Life relationships are incredibly intense. When you add the pressure of a romanticized holiday, it causes real trouble.

So how do we make sure Cupid’s arrows strike us in the heart and not between the eyeballs?

Easy enough. Just remember the holiday we’re about to celebrate is about love. Not perfect love, not eternal love, not romanticized love, not expensive love. Just love, the kind with no qualifiers.

Whatever love is to you, whatever form it takes—whether you spend Valentine’s Day with your best friend or by yourself, it’s not how you love that matters; it’s that you do love.