Love from Your Valentine

There is an efficacy, a tendency of heart even, to reflect forthright and without avail to oneself that state of affairs so provoking, precipitating denial.

Today being, or having been as nears the morrow, Valentine’s day, it is an appropriate discourse to proffer: How is it connected love, denial and this electronic medium by which I write?

We know it connected, of course, and yet rather the question remains how and why.

Online dating site Match.com advertises “20,000 new U.S. singles joining every day.” That means today, Valentine’s Day, 20,000 people braved the Ethernet of judgment and started filling out profiles, uploading pictures and judging; judging, judging, judging – who, what, where, why, you?

Just keeping with Match.com, that means 7.3 million people create profiles in the course of a year searching for that something that is missing; that something they crave – that we all crave most certainly.

Today is Valentine’s day and I know that at least 20,000 people are experiencing that most feared venue of the human capacity: loneliness.

We are lonely, creating and offering in scripted procession the workings of a culture; an online culture of romance and need and desire and want and, perhaps most prevalent, of uncertainty.

We are a culture of discerning consumer who do not know for certain what is wanted but is most assuredly known what is not to be wanted.

Today is Valentine’s Day and thus most assuredly 20,000 people are looking, seeking. We are 3 billion people on this earth; a lilting, breathing, demanding race of needs and of desires.

The legend of the early Christian priest, Valentine, who was martyred for acting against Emperor Claudius II’s decree forbidding the marrying of single men speaks of the indescribable action that stems from the unforeseen, unknowable.

It is said that Valentine, prior to his beheading, was imprisoned, during which he fell in love with the daughter of the prison guard. He left, as legend dictates, a note for his beloved before his death signed, of course: “Love from your Valentine.”

20,000 lonely people out there; a number most certainly exponential and of no limit in terms of what such a true statistic would be. And though the limit of 200 characters and the choosing of your screen-name may not measure in metaphor as that tragically penned first Valentine, it is a reminder rather of the history of this commercialized, achingly gaudy holiday and of a history that lives on….20,000 people at a time.