Sigh no more, singles. Valentine's Day is meant to make couples miserable, not you.

It's important for me to make it clear, before I say ought else, that I really love my wife. I'm happy with our marriage most of the time, which is, I believe, a lot more than most people can say. If you were to pick 100 women at random throughout the world and sample them for how well-suited to me they would be, Mrs. Heretic would be in the top three of group after group of those women time after time. Some dreamers think marriage is a bust unless you get the one perfect match out of all the billions of possibilities. That's stupid dreaming. In the real world, getting anyone in the 95th percentile is really good fortune in a wife.

But the assholes who bring you Valentine's Day every year will never let you just enjoy how much you've beaten the odds. They will not let you be content being content. It isn't enough you got a spouse well-suited to you at a statistically serendipitous rate. She must be THE PERFECT wife. She must be your other half, split from you before time and then surgically re-attached to you by God, Cupid, and Nicholas Sparks.

Valentines, Inc. doesn't want you to just be happy. You've got to be perpetually ecstatic, and you've got to prove how excrementally ecstatic you are each and every day. Moreover, you've got to leave tangible proof of your ecstasy in a form that can be shared on social media.

The Single's Lament 

Every year around this time, I see posts from my single friends about what the impending Dia del Amor means to them. Some take it as a joke, posting about how they're going to be drunk alone or masturbating or pondering suicide. Others post earnest or passive aggressive things about how couples should be considerate of those not fortunate enough to have someone special to love.

For the record, I'd file this one under passive-aggressive.  

As a person in my mid-forties who has not achieved many of the things on my to-do list in life, I'm certainly not going to be dismissive of your feelings of being let-down if you're single and hating it. And I realize that settling down and having a family isn't like my dream of publishing a successful novel. There's a clock on the family dream. If you're my age and a woman, then the window of opportunity is closing fast or has closed on having kids the old-fashioned way. I don't blame you for your sadness.

But you mustn't think that Valentine's Day is a day out to get you. It's out to get me. You aren't playing the game, and so you don't get judged on whether you're the perfect plus one to your mate.

My Valentine's Day this year

I hate crowds and traffic, and so I generally hate to go out on Valentine's Day. But I've been feeling pretty good about my marriage lately, and I wanted to go out and celebrate with Mrs. Heretic. Let me say that part again--I wanted to go out and celebrate with her. Nobody was forcing me. There was no perfunctory feeling to it. It was a genuine feeling on my part. I came up with my own idea because I wanted to.

I asked her if she wanted to go out the Friday before the holiday to avoid the crowds. We'd get a nice dinner, then go to the mall--the good one--and use some of our tax refund to buy the clothes we'd be needing to get for a while. She likes to shop, and I thought if I went with her in a good mood, that'd be a nice night for her. I offered to throw in a trip to pick up a charm for her Pandora's bracelet.

The night pretty much went as planned. We had a nice dinner, in which I gave up my share of the bottle of wine so she could be happy-drunk and I could drive home without worry. We got clothes in a stress-free mostly empty mall. The emptiness of the mall meant we were free to make out here and there. I suggested she get an impromptu ten-minute massage. I thought it was a fun night together.

Right at the beginning, though, as we were on our way to dinner, she said something about settling for an off-night instead of the actual night. She made it sound like she was sacrificing to make me happy, because I didn't want to go out on the actual February 14th. She suggested it would have been more romantic to make a reservation for the night itself instead of working around it. It wasn't a long or a constant harangue. It didn't ruin the evening. It hurt my feelings just the littlest bit. It was just a tiny blip in any otherwise fun night that made it not quite perfect. And not perfect on Valentine's Day is, of course, the worst fucking thing that could happen ever and you might as well call the divorce attorney right now.

I blame Jack Pearson

Why was our mostly-good-but-not-quite-perfect evening not enough? I blame a string of characters we've been made to compare ourselves to. This year, it's Jack Pearson.

This man is pretty much the worst person ever. I fucking hate this guy. 

On the show This is Us, Jack is a child of an abusive, alcoholic father and a depressed mother. His brother, who helped him survive his childhood, dies in Vietnam, where Jack also served. Jack nearly fell into a life of crime, but then he met Rebecca, and everything changed for him. He is romantic, given to grand gestures. He has just the teensiest bit of an alcohol problem, but not in a way that makes him mean to his wife or kids ever. His addiction mostly happens off-camera, and it's only there so the show doesn't get accused of making Jack too perfect. But he is too perfect. He's perfect in his adoration for Rebecca. Every mistake he makes is just a way for him to be more grandly romantic. Every man in 2018 will get graded on the Jack Pearson scale of sweetness and devotion, and we will all fall short. 

I could be more like Jack. I could plan picnics and surprise getaways. I could insist that Valentine's Day was meant to be overdone or not done at all. But that's a trap you can never get out of. Once you do one grand romantic gesture, it demands another, grander one, or else you're left feeling you've lost something. Something done once in a genuine fashion quickly becomes something you're a slave to. Moreover, the whole thing smells of artifice. It's as fake as the holiday itself. 

I never wanted to be a breadwinner. I feared that kind of responsibility, because I didn't think I was cut out for it. I've done it for fourteen years, though, because it kind of just happened that way. This is how I show how much I love the woman I'm with. I keep it together. I don't even complain that much about it most days. I do what I have to do so we can do what we want to do. I don't expect much more from Mrs. Heretic than that she try to keep it together, too. And most days of the year, we're very happy with one another keeping it together. 

Then this particular fucking holiday rolls around to make you feel that good enough is not good enough, although I've been around long enough to know that good enough is actually great. My day-to-day better than average is awesome. It's worth celebrating. Except Valentine's Day tells me that I need to be Jack Pearson when I really just want to go on being Jake Weber. 

Not comparing who has it harder day-to-day, but I am claiming February 14th

I don't want to get into some kind of who-has-it-worse competition with single folks. Loneliness can actually kill you. Some people love their single lives, others are bitter about it. You're welcome to either reaction, or anything in between. If you claim you've got it better than me, then you probably do. If you claim you've got it worse, then you probably do, too. 

But the fourteenth of February is tougher on me than it is on you, single folks. (I mean, unless, like, your husband died on Valentine's Day or some shit like that.) Let's leave aside the financial debacle of the thing, coming right after I've just had to pay the credit card bill from Christmas. Every year starts off with me feeling like I'm supposed to be hopeful for a better year, even though with each year that goes by, I give up a little more on certain key hopes I had for my life. But I adjust, and trudge through the cold and the sludge and try to focus on what is still within my reach. At the very top of the list of blessings I count is how much I enjoy my family. And the best part of my family is Mrs. Heretic, the one I started it with. My life is not what I hoped it would be, but on most days, I think about my wife and my family, and it seems like it is enough.

Then this stupid holiday comes along and makes me feel like neither my life, my marriage, nor I personally am nearly enough. It's a hurdle to get through that I dread. And I can't even rise above it just by knowing I'm being manipulated by a culture with asinine assumptions about love. I grew up with enough romantic comedies that I can never de-internalize some of those idiotic concepts. Part of me will always think of love in Lloyd Dobler terms, or some other sap. (I wonder if Lloyd Dobler ever figured out what to do for a job? When he did, did he become less sweet?) There will be a voice in my head that feels if I'm not literally melting Mrs. Heretic's face off with romance, then the end is nigh (or might as well be). 

The worst part about this is that it obscures the very good thing I do have. Valentine's Day makes it hard for me to see what I appreciate most other days of the year: that graded on terms of how love actually (another terrible movie) works in the real world, ours is pretty great, and I'm lucky to have what I have. Valentine's Day is my Tantalus punishment--where I am within arm's reach of the thing I want, and still unable to enjoy it. 

But feel free to start up the "being single sucks" memes again on February 15th. I'll give them a thumbs-up.