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In the 90s, relationship issues author Michael Webb faced an issue many of us who write about love have grappled with at some time or other: Valentine’s Day. This holiday, while full of good intention, was created by companies who stood to gain a lot from people who purchased their products to show one another their love.
Webb worried that the emphasis had a tendency to be placed on things as opposed to the relationships themselves, and on 1995, he decided to begin campaigning for a seven-day celebration six months after Valentine’s that shifted the focus back to where it should be: the people in the relationship. Resurrect Romance Week, which begins on the second full week of August, is a time for couples to consider their affection in terms of time and attention, not things.
Photo by Julien Haler.
Webb’s suggestion for couples is to try to do romantic, but inexpensive things every day of the week to grow closer together. If you are wondering why people need a holiday to do what they should be doing every day anyway, consider how rarely we put work and personal goals on the back-burner for our significant others and our friends. They’re the ones who have to understand when something comes up at work, when we’re inspired and writing, when we have to go to this conference and that.
Lovers and friends make all the concessions. It’s not this way at the beginning, when we bend even the laws of gravity for a new flame, and certainly every once in a blue moon, during an emergency, we have proved that we are more than fair-weather friends. But these tend to be the exception, not the rule.
Most of us don’t pencil friends and lovers into our planners. We don’t take their calls when we’re busy. Why do clients get to interrupt dinner when the people who love us most have to understand we’re just going to have to reschedule because a project’s come up?
Holidays like these, like anniversaries, impose themselves on our lives and planners to remind us that we have to make that time for the people who matter the most, the ones who are there to pick up the pieces when a deal falls through, the ones who stand by in escrow or foreclosure. You can call these holidays silly if you want, or you can smile at the brave attempt to bring the focus back.
I used to think such holidays were ridiculous myself, as I wrote in my defense of Valentine's Day last year. When I was married, my ex-husband and I made a point to discuss our disdain in regard to Valentine’s Day, effectively banning it. There would no pressure to make a mockery of our union by selecting a single day to commemorate it -- not with Valentine's and not with an anniversary, either. We were living those things every day, were we not?
Such holidays were an affront to the obvious joy we experienced just being together, and flew in the face of personal and mutual efficiency. After all, the time we spent stressing about what to get each other could be better spent doing something else -- like working to move our personal success forward, and therefore our union. And the resources spent on gifts could be better suited to things we really wanted -- like the down payment on another home or another car. You can't have too many of those, you know.
Fast forward two years. You have a relationship that is fairly efficient. Everyone knows what to expect and when. The frills had been cut away. We were the bare bones and organs of love: no fat, no bullshit. I didn't tolerate dinner parties, so I often skipped Sunday dinner at his aunt's. He didn't "understand" my friends, so he passed on that. We made each other nuts traveling together, so we took separate planes. He worked better in the day and I worked best at night, so we cleaved our life together into separate shifts.
We made time to be together, of course. Breakfast before I went to bed and he went to work, dinner when he got home and I was getting ready to start writing. Sometimes I would curl up in bed with him until he fell asleep, then sneaked out to go write. Sometimes he turned off his phone when we drove out to our second home in the desert. Little things to show it was important
