My experiences with Valentine’s Day have been somewhat mixed over the years. When I was at school, I loathed and detested it and was overjoyed on the years when it fell during the half term holiday, because I hated feeling like the only person who didn’t actually know any boys and thus wouldn’t be getting a card. When I started university I quickly found a boyfriend, and was terribly excited about my first Valentine’s Day with him. As luck would have it it was on a Friday that year, and so the plan was to skip our afternoon lectures and go to the cinema to watch Leonardo di Caprio in Catch Me If You Can, then back to his flat to eat pizza. The going back to his flat part was highly contentious. As far as my mother was aware, I had never been to his flat at all and when I requested to be picked up from there at 10pm she started having conniptions and asked me why I thought a strange guy would invite me back to a flat full of other strange guys in the middle of the night. To be fair to my slightly hysterical mother, she hadn’t actually met my boyfriend at this point and so had no way of knowing that he didn’t have enough imagination to seduce me

As it happened, I woke up on Valentine’s Day with a cold. I was gutted, totally unable to believe the tragic misfortune which had befallen me. We still went to the cinema and ate pizza but my boyfriend requested that I not kiss him so that he didn’t contract it to, and so the day didn’t turn out quite how I had hoped. As it happened, at this point I believed I was in love with someone who wasn’t my boyfriend at all. But he lived in a different country which complicated matters somewhat, and my actual boyfriend wrote such a nice message in my card that I decided perhaps it was time to start wanting what I had rather than having what I wanted, and give up the other guy.

Two days after Valentine’s Day I thus told my illicit love interest that it was over, I had found someone else. That was quite a momentous day in my life. I still remember it now, sitting in the physics computer laboratory on a wet Monday afternoon, typing and retyping this email, hesitating over to whether to press send, knowing there was no way back if I did. I took a deep breath, submitted it, then spent several hours walking briskly round the university ring road in the pouring rain, trying to walk the emotions out of my system.

The response I got was peculiarly heartbroken and incoherent. I hadn’t known he’d cared. He informed me that he had written a letter to me and put it in the post, and that when it arrived I should instantly put the first six pages in the wastepaper basket. Two days after that it arrived and I couldn’t help but read the first six pages. He had announced he was coming to England for a year so we could be together.

The irony was really quite amusing, in a black sort of way. I had spent months and months trying to get some sort of commitment out of this guy, some sort of admission that he cared about me enough for it to be worth me messing up my life for his sake, and I finally got it a week after I had given up on him. I was tempted to tell everyone it had all been a mistake, to dump my English boyfriend and live happily ever after with my foreign one. I didn’t, because I had given the English guy my word and I felt it would be morally wrong to go back on that. I’m glad now that that was the decision I took; I think I had a lucky escape. But for years and years afterwards, I bitterly regretted it

Foreign Guy didn’t speak to me for the next four months. When he finally made contact we had a bizarre argument which started with our interpretation of the sentence “Die Frauen begehen ihre Dummheiten, wenn sie sehr ungluecklich sind” and ended with a quotation from Goethe, “Meine Ruh’ ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer. Ich find’ sie nimmer und nimmer mehr. Mein armer Sinn ist mir verrueckt, mein armer Kopf ist mir zerstueckt”. An argument which, in essence, was about everything except the actual issue between us. The issue hung between us in a threatening manner and occasionally toyed with exploding, but neither of us dared to touch on it.

The next Valentine’s Day, which I believe was 2004, surpassed even that one in weirdness. My attempts to fall out of love with Foreign Guy had been somewhat unsuccessful and I was going through an unhealthy period of hankering over what might have been. Goodness knows how I came upon such a bizarre idea, but I decided to send him an anonymous card. I guess I figured that there was no harm done, that it wasn’t a betrayal of my boyfriend if it was anonymous. The practical difficulties involved in this were, however, immense. I was pretty sure I was the only acquaintance he possessed in the UK, and so a British postmark on the envelope was going to give the game away. So, I decided it would have to be an e-card and set about constructing myself an anonymous email address.

The day came and the card was sent. I logged into my new account to see if I had received the automatic notification which would indicate that it had been received, and discovered that I had not only that, but also an email from the guy himself.

Wer bist du?

A normal, sane and rational person would not have answered that question. I am not a normal, sane or rational person.

Ich bin jemand, der dir eine Karte senden wollte, dir aber keine Karte senden sollte

I thought that was quite a clever response. But he replied to that, and I couldn’t resist replying again in a mysterious sort of way, and so it was that a couple of days later I was sitting in a Java lesson, anonymously flirting with him in cyberspace. What can I say? It was exhilaratingly fun, those were a few of the most enjoyable days of my life. He had no idea who I was, in fact he believed I was a German girl, and the experience was quite liberating. We were laughing and joking with each other in a way which we had never been able to before; he treated me quite differently when he didn’t know who I was.

And then… he found out Things started to a get a bit out of control when he suggested I call him. Obviously I had to decline. He had actually decided that I was an Esperantist and asked me to speak to him in Esperanto. That was a bit of a problem for me. I managed a feeble, “Ne, la germana lingvo estas pli bela”, but that was as far as it went. I had been concerned that my German language skills were going to let me down. I had only been learning for a couple of years after all, and so it was a bit of a tall order to try and imitate a native. In the end it wasn’t my grammar which did for me though, not even my vocab. It was my umlauts or, more precisely, my lack thereof

Things could have been quite different had I had a proper grasp of Character Map. At this stage in my life, however, I was yet to make its acquaintance, and seeing as the only computers at university to which I had access belonged to the Physics department and thus did not possess Microsoft Word or any similar word-processing package, I was incapable of inserting special characters. I was therefore reduced to writing my umlauts thus: ae, oe, ue. No self-respecting German in possession of a German computer keyboard would do such a thing, and so it was that I was sprung :cry:

Much to my surprise, however, Foreign Guy was not particular horrified and did something which he had never successfully managed before; admitted that he was in love with me We were both so surprised by this situation that the implications took a while to sink in, but once it had we came to the conclusion that the way forward was to elope. I explained this to my boyfriend, who took it much better than a boyfriend should, and asked if there was any way he could help. Things went well for a week or so but by mid-March the cracks in the idea were beginning to show. Foreign Guy was trying to push me too fast in directions I wasn’t comfortable with going in. This led to a massive argument about my family and what he always termed my “way of life” which was in some indefinable way inferior to his way of life, and the upshot was that he went to an Esperanto meeting in Italy over Easter and came back with a girlfriend.

That was the end of me

Actually it was the best possible thing that could have happened. Whilst I may not have the moral scruples necessary to prevent myself cheating on my own boyfriend, I at least have sufficient not to cheat with anybody else’s and so it was that at long last I managed to get over somebody who I didn’t know properly in the first place and who would have been a complete disaster for me

Deciding to continue trying to work things out with my actual boyfriend (with whom, before you say anything, I had gotten together on the understanding that we were both in love with other people and it was a temporary arrangement for the sake of convenience), I made it to my third Valentine’s Day which has definitely gone down in history as my happiest of all time. I went back to his flat for a meal and some free internet access, and then we exchanged cards. I’d written him a poem, which I know longer have a copy of so I can’t pass judgment as to how sick-making it was, and then suddenly he left the room and reappeared with a bunch of red roses. Wow

They were the most beautiful red rose you can imagine. I mean, my Dad buys them for my Mom every year, but when we put our vases side by side, mine were far superior. They were an amazingly dark shade of red; just perfect. And they lasted for over a week I was deliriously happy that day! I got my sister to take some photographs of them before they died and I’ve still got the resulting pictures, in a notebook which lives next to my bed. I take them out and look at them to cheer me up when I’m depressed I figured I’d better keep a memento because that was only the second time I’d ever been bought flowers, the first being when I was ten, and no one might ever buy me flowers again. Or at least, not until I was dead, at which point I might not be in a proper state to appreciate them fully. It always strikes me as rather pointless to buy flowers for the dead. It is so much nicer to receive flowers when you are still alive

In fact those remain the only flowers I have ever had, with the exception of another bunch from the same guy the subsequent year. We had, however, already split up at this point, and so they didn’t have quite the same impact. 2006 – that was a Valentine’s Day I tried to ignore on the grounds of being pretty much single again. And then, 2007 and I’d managed to ensnare another boyfriend He came to have lunch with me which was rather nice, or at least would have been had we not gone for a Chinese I struggle to see the attraction to Chinese food. I was hoping I could just get away with eating a bowl of dry rice, but they put lettuce through it which substantially spoiled the experience. Still, I was so in love at this point that I don’t think I actually cared

I had Valentine’s Day two days early this year, because my now no longer quite so new boyfriend is working on Thursday evening, hence this post. We went to Walkabout in Birmingham which is quite nice bar where we used to go when we first started going out. Or possibly, before we first started going out :unsure: They do terribly nice burgers there; my boyfriend is rather partial to Springbok and I’ve discovered that the chicken schnitzel is highly tasty, but unfortunately they seem to have altered their chip supplier over the past few months and the new product is scarcely edible

I got several lovely presents; a device for recharging batteries via a USB socket, some tiny rubber ducks and a bookmark with useful phrases of French on it, all very nicely wrapped in shiny gold paper. I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t bothered to wrap his presents I did write a big long message in his card, however, to compensate for last year when I apparently wrote a joke. I refuse to believe that I would possibly have written a joke in someone’s Valentine’s card, but cannot actually remember and my boyfriend has so far declined to present the offending item as evidence, so I am only taking his word for it!

Not the most dramatic of Valentine’s Days in comparison to some of my prior year escapades, but certainly a nice one Hopefully next year’s will not involve going out anywhere at all, as by then we will (fingers crossed!) have our own place. It seems a strange thought, trying to imagine that, but a very happy one; there can be few things happier than acquiring a house with someone you love Whatever love means; that is, of course, the famous quote from Prince Charles, which personally I think was quite profound and didn’t at all deserve all the hoo-hah people have made about it. Tis a difficult question, but perhaps love just means wanting to be in the same place as someone who actually drives you mad

Tags: Valentine's Day

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