We’ve never made a super big deal out of Valentines Day. I think we’ve both had more fun, the last couple of years, meeting up with friends to celebrate Jared’s birthday, instead of doing the Valentine’s thing. Nor have we ever been really over the top on any of our anniversaries. In fact, both of us frequently forget them altogether. It could be argued that it’s because we have too many. One reason we have so many is because for the longest time, we couldn’t agree on what constituted our anniversary, since we weren’t able to legally marry until very recently. I favored February 7, as the anniversary of our first date. Michael leaned toward Easter, because we first met (nearly three years before that first date) at the NorthWest Science Fiction Convention on an Easter weekend. There was also a strong argument to be made for the date we signed and notarized the domestic partnership papers and had a party with friends, of course.

Now that we are finally legally hitched (and given what a struggle it has been to get it legal here), shouldn’t our wedding anniversary be the one we observe?

Or course, it’s impossible to forget about Valentine’s Day. I know this because I have been told many, many, many times by various people how the way our society deals with Valentine’s Day amounts to oppression or even abuse of people who are not in a relationship…

I haven’t always been in a relationship. I got so used to being in the emotional space of being single and not terribly happy about it, that it’s still something of a shock to me every morning to wake up and discover I’m not alone. Seriously, after 16 years with Michael, and 7 years with Ray (until his death), I still have trouble accepting that I’m not single.

I know what it felt like seeing people happily paired off when I wasn’t. I knew the pain of being completely smitten with someone who was in love with one of my best friends. I knew the double-pain of having a crush on a guy and not being able to share the misery with anyone else because not even my closest friends knew I wasn’t straight. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t loved. I had friends whom I loved as friends, and who loved me back. But while that is a good thing, it didn’t feel like enough. It’s wonderful to be genuinely loved like a brother, it is. It just isn’t the only kind of love that most of us crave.

So I understand, really, I do, why just seeing Michael and I together being happy can cause someone else heartache. There were times I felt that heartache. There were times I said something to one of my friends that made them feel guilty for being in a relationship. There were probably times I lashed out a little, made a snide remark or snarky joke to try to make them hurt as much as I did. So I understand where the negative comments come from.

But I refuse to feel guilty for being in love. When I was single and made other people feel guilty, their guilt didn’t alleviate my loneliness by one iota. When I lashed out and hurt their feelings, it didn’t get me one step closer to happiness. All that happened was they were hurt, and I wallowed in self-pity.

I managed, somehow, to learn to stop wallowing quite so much. At least enough that when I met and fell for a guy who loved me back the same way, I was able to make a relationship out of it.

When you fall madly and deeply in love with someone who loves you back, it’s impossible to keep it to yourself. You want people to know what a great person your significant other is. You want to share the joy with your family and friends. Even when you’re a gay man living in a very homophobic society, it’s very difficult to be in love and keep it a secret. So I understand why people want to share how happy they feel with others.

I also think that a lot of people put a little too much emphasis on the “couple” part of that situation. I don’t believe that there is one and only one soulmate out there for everyone. I don’t believe that no one is capable of loving more than one person at a time. And I don’t believe that everyone would be happiest if they were in a relationship with their “one true love.”

So, tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. The eve of the Ides of February, which was the beginning of an ancient Roman celebration of fertility and purity (hard for some people to believe those go together). Some parts of the Roman festival were rather shocking to the prudish sensibilities of the early Catholic church, which is probably the reason that a pope declared Feb. 14 the Feast of St. Valentine in 498 AD. The oldest surviving Valentine Greeting (a love letter which specifically mentions St. Valentine’s Day as a day to celebrate one’s love) is a letter written by the Duke of Orleans to his wife in 1415, while she was imprisoned in the Tower of London (take that, everyone who claims the holiday was invented by greeting card companies; in fact it was the other way around).

This year, Michael and I plan to go out to dinner with friends and celebrate a birthday. There may be sappy love notes exchanged earlier in the day. It’s more than slightly possible a flower may be involved.

Or maybe not. We don’t need a special day to remind us that we love each other. Much more important is that we’re there for each other, every day.

“A feeling that is here one minute
And gone the next
Cannot be called love.”
–Kabir