Valentine’s Day Redux

Happy Valentine’s Day to you, and happy anniversary to me. It was one year ago today that I launched this Web site with an ode of sorts to Valentine’s Day. Alas, a year has passed and I’m still without a sweetheart. That’s okay, though; most couples I know have gone from being in love to being ready to slip arsenic in each other’s cappucino, or are so nauseatingly in love they might as well be Siamese twins. I hope to find a happy medium for my mate and me, if I ever find one.

Surely my ideal woman is out there somewhere. All I want is a cute deaf-mute Buddhist orphan, preferably Asian. That would be my ideal mate for these reasons: I’m not a big talker and tire quickly of idle chitchat, so silence wouldn’t bother me; I’d prefer an orphan so there would be no obnoxious in-laws to deal with; a Buddhist would come close to sharing my non-religious beliefs; and I’ve always found Asian women to be particularly attractive. If you know such a woman, send her my way. I’ll pay the postage.

I realize it may be too late for me. Once one spends a certain length of time living alone—say, 16 years—it gets harder to change one’s ways to adapt to another’s needs, wants, and disgusting personal habits. For example, I consider my TV remote to be an extension of myself that is as private as my own naughty bits; sharing it requires considerable trust. Plus, there’s my bed. While I enjoy physical intimacy as much as anyone, I enjoy having my bed to myself so that I can flop around like a flounder without disturbing anyone, and bring Ritz crackers and Cheez Whiz aboard in the middle of the night without fear of getting bitched at.

My older brother, on the other hand, has been married to an increasingly insane woman for about 30 years. Lately his wife has taken to carrying steak knives around the house at night, presumably for protection against home-invading cows. My brother takes Ambien to sleep, and has been known to get up in the middle of night and bring food to bed. One night his wife awoke to find a mound of cold mashed potatoes on her back. This is understandably annoying if it isn’t a part of sexual foreplay—which in this case it wasn’t. Thanks to the Ambien, my brother had no memory of the incident… or so he says. I only hope that some night my sister-in-law doesn’t carve up him up like a juicy t-bone.

It’s stories like this that make me appreciate being single.

Still, as vague as my memories of being in love have become, I’m pretty sure I miss it. I have yet to find abiding, lifelong love, as few people do. But who doesn’t enjoy the initial stages of a romantic relationship—the giddiness of sexual attraction, the first nervous kiss, the creative use of whipped toppings and handcuffs?

Scientists, who have a nasty habit of stripping the mystery and poetry out of all experience, regard romantic love as a mere social mask for the true evolutionary business at hand: making babies. A recent study of kissing postulates that osculation is a kind of unconscious exploratory test to see if the person with whom you’re swapping spit is worthy of producing offspring. (Does this mean that gay people are unconsciously testing for something else, like keen fashion sense?) I know I’m a pretty good kisser, because more than a couple of women have told me so. Perhaps my saliva has betrayed me by revealing that I don’t have the best immune system available or that I want a child about as much as I want dengue fever. Or perhaps it’s just me.  If I’d known that short, bald, cynical misanthropes weren’t in high demand, I might’ve aspired to be something else.

If the feeling of love really comes down to simple chemistry, there’s hope for us all. It’s long been known that chocolate contains phenylethylamine, a chemical that can stimulate love-like feelings in the brain. So my advice to my fellow singles, both male and female, is to go out and get yourselves a giant box of dark chocolate and gobble it down. It’ll make you feel a little high, it won’t snore or nag you, and once you’re done with it, you can toss out the container without a twinge of remorse.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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