I didn’t plan to get married on Valentine’s Day. It just kind of happened. It was February 10th, I needed to get married that weekend, and my mom came over to where I was working. She said, “You know, Sunday is Valentine’s Day.” We shrugged and smiled and pulled together a little wedding for family and friends in my parents’ living room. I wore a red dress and our cake was heart-shaped. It made our anniversary easy to remember.
I’m not sure what happened to Valentine’s Day. When I was growing up, it was a kids’ holiday, small and sentimental. We all brought in milk cartons, which we decorated as mailboxes into which our classmates slipped small cards in thin white envelopes. There would be a party, where we would eat cupcakes and open our Valentines. This sounds harmless, yes?
Back then, you were not required to give Valentines to everyone in your class. I certainly didn’t. I got fewer cards than the popular girls, which wasn’t crushing. But my cards always included drawings of hippos, elephants and the like. I was not fat, just tall and shy, but that was enough to get me the insulting cards back in the day. That was crushing. But that’s what Valentine’s Day was in the sixties — small and sentimental, sometimes disheartening.
And as my marriage progressed, we had kids, and they had their school Valentine parties. These were much as I remembered, but some things had changed; everyone brought everyone a card, which I thought was nice, and the card assortments no longer included anything insulting, which I thought was VERY nice. I sent cupcakes for the parties and thanked my husband for the card and flowers that he invariably remembered to get, and that was that, for Valentine’s Day.
I didn’t foresee it being a big deal, having a February 14th wedding anniversary. But somewhere in the 12 years I was married, Valentine’s Day had transformed from kids’ parties to some overwhelming romantic holiday spectacle. A holiday full of jewelry, travel, dinner in places that required reservations, and couples massages. It ballooned in importance, and its approach reminded me that I was alone, abandoned, raising three kids by myself, and bitter.
I was a mess. All it took was one pink cardboard heart to shred my own. I’d walk into the grocery store, just innocently going to get some milk, and I’d be confronted with BANKS of pink flowers and rows of cards and towers of heart-shaped candy boxes. Above it all waved colonnades of shiny Mylar balloons, with sappy messages that reminded me of how alone I was.
I tried several ways to fix it. First, I contained it. That’s SOP for me — I put pain in a corner, erect a barrier of humor around it, and deal with it when I’m ready. I made a lot of jokes about how stupid I was to get married on Valentine’s Day, exaggerating my agony for comic effect, fooling no one, I’m sure. Because no matter how biting, how caustic I was, everyone knew I was speaking from my hurt.
Next, I put little decorations here and there, to harden my heart to the pain they caused. Sort of a self-vaccination approach. If I surrounded myself with enough cardboard hearts, maybe they would lose their power to shred my real heart.
Then, I decided to stop moping about not having a Valentine, because I had three. My daughters always woke up to Valentines; a sweet card for each of them, some candy or a troll doll, whatever I’d found to tell my girls that they were, indeed, my Valentines.
That helped, but it did not cure me. I still felt my loneliness in a terrible way when February 14th rolled around. So I started on another strategy; Valentine dates.
All the societal build-up had apparently made grown-up, middle-aged men worried about whether or not they had Valentines. There were little articles about it on the news sites, “How to handle being single on Valentine’s Day” and the like, and they were aimed at men as well as women.
I almost couldn’t believe it. I can guarantee you that none of the men in the generation preceding mine EVER GAVE A MOMENT’S THOUGHT TO HAVING A VALENTINE. But these men cared, and so did I. So we’d kind of fumble our way together in January, and endure some awkward date on February 14th, and then cash it in a week or two after. That only made it worse. Something wrong won’t make it right.
Independently of my Valentine agony, I worked on filling the hole my divorce left in me. Recovering from my divorce took years, therapy, writing a novel about my experience, and a crash course in forgiveness. I had to give up the righteous anger of being wronged, and let myself heal.
The kind of relationships you can’t have when you’re toxic from your bad divorce. And when I was seeing someone, Valentine’s Day would come and we’d exchange cards and/or candy, and we might go out to dinner, or stay in, or forget about it entirely. It didn’t feel like a make or break.
And when I was single, I wasn’t hurt by radio commercials for heart-shaped diamond pendants that no woman wants to wear. I didn’t feel pangs when those silly balloons were gently bumping overhead while I grocery shopped. Every heart-shaped candy box stopped being a painful reminder of marital disaster. February 14th wasn’t a yearly anniversary of loss and failure. It was just Valentine’s Day. A sweet, sentimental holiday of cardboard hearts and pink roses.
I kind of like it, now. And I still send Valentines to my daughters.
It seems like I’ve been waiting for the clothes of the future for a long time. All my life, actually. And I’m getting impatient.
My idea of the clothes of the future was no doubt colored by my early watching of Star Trek. No, not the crew uniforms–those were absurd to me, even at age nine–but when the ship made a stop at the planet Vulcan when a tortured Spock went into season needed to go upstream and spawn or whatever? (Amok Time). I remembered those Vulcans were wearing the clothes of the future. However, having googled the clothes, they are not at all as I remember them–the clothes I’m thinking of came in the later movies.
So flowing. So easy. Long. Unisex. Caftanesque. Tastefully trimmed, carefully draped.
Wouldn’t we all, if given a chance, adopt these particular clothes of the future?
It turns out, probably not.
So imagine my surprise when I was out to lunch with three friends and I brought up this whole idea of futuristic clothing and what it would look like, and I got widely differing responses.
One friend said he thought the clothing of the future would be technical and responsive. If the weather changed, or you gained or lost weight, the clothing would simply adjust. This friend has lost weight this year and had to keep going “shopping” in his stored clothes to find things that fit him on the way down. So of course he liked the idea of something that would simply adjust itself to a slimmer frame.
Another friend loved the idea of reactive clothing, but he thought it would also be style-reactive. Which kind of blew my mind. I mean, here I am, imagining these lovely subdued flowy things, like Madame Gres with slightly less fabric, and and he’s imagining a world where we would easily sprout peacock feathers if we wanted to! And of COURSE people would want to. Not everyone wants to blend in with the walls. Garments would flame with embellishment and color as desired. Like we were all living in the Capitol.
All this gleeful frippery, these mods and makeups, not. I am not of the Capitol. I am a fan of the black and the charcoal and the neutral and the plain, enlivened by a shot of aubergine or teal now and then. On the day to day, I could wear black, grey and camel all the time and hardly miss colors at all. Which means I have a sort of a grimly dystopian idea of clothing of the future.
I remember being super impressed with Ripley’s Nostromo jumpsuit in Aliens.
At the time, it struck me as functional, customizable, unisex, practical. I was all over it. Now I’m wondering what all that lacing is for. Would we specifically want the fabric over our tummies to be tightened down, a la Scarlett O’Hara getting laced up before the ball? Would Spandex not work in outer space or something? And as functional as it seems, we always end up back at the primary question with jumpsuits–how do you go to the bathroom quickly? These are important questions, but man, did it ever seem “real” to me when that movie came out.
I also liked the clothing in The Giver, believe it or not.
Isn’t that depressing? it’s like, the Amish wardrobe of the future. All homespun and indigo.
I could so go for this!
The other woman at our lunch gathering had similar ideas to my original caftan ideas. Long, graceful, easy, and with hidden pockets. Weatherproof. Soil-proof. One and done, but she envisioned these garments as metallic. Metallic seems like a stretch for me. But I could do metallic if I needed to. If it were necessary. Especially if it looked like THIS.
I would so love that! That is a beautiful handling of color and metallic and style. But is it futuristic? Also, I wonder what would happen if I began sweeping around Portland dressed like this. People would probably think I was trying to start a religious cult.
If you had the opportunity to design a clothing sensibility for the future, what would it look like? Would it be implanted peacock feathers or unisex jumpsuits? I guess the mistake we make is that somehow, in the future, clothing will gather up under one unified umbrella and fashion will flow from a single source. I think the opposite will probably happen. We will all get to wear what we want.
It’s going to be fashion Babel.