SRF Heavy Industries

I know it’s fairly easy for single people to be a bit bitter on Valentine’s Day. In fact, I lean in that direction myself, and I don’t mind admitting it. If you’ve ever been someone else’s special someone, this day throws the absence, either generally or specifically, into sharp relief. And that’s insensitive to nearly the point of being unforgivable.

And it’s ass-backwards.

If you go back to the story that’s rumored to be at the root of the day (well, as it is now, after all that bit about flogging all the young women of the town with bloody strips of raw goat hide), it’s not about being appreciated at all. It’s not about what love for someone else turns you into, what your own love, in your own head and your own heart, makes you do. The new thing that you become because of the love you have for someone else.

That really doesn’t require the involvement of anyone else. At least, not actively.

What *someone else’s* love makes you do is probably a lot closer to guilt. When you think about it. Guilt. Fear of disfavor, or rejection, or being thought of as inadequate, or of failing the test. And screw all of that. If that’s what someone else’s love does to you, then maybe they should keep it. Or maybe you should fix your own head so you can receive it in the right spirit. Or maybe your own love can overwhelm all of that so there isn’t any chance, much less fear, of failure.

Even so, it’s not about your special someone, or being someone else’s special someone. It’s all about you becoming the thing that your love turns you into, the heroics that you can perform that are usually just out of reach, which, lets face it, are just as likely to fail as succeed. It’s about love forcing you to make the attempt even though you’re unlikely to come through it unscathed. It’s about ignoring the consequences to yourself.

And maybe that sort of thing isn’t for everybody. At least maybe not every year. Maybe you need to have someone inspire that in you. But if *that’s* what’s missing, maybe that’s not such a tragedy. Love can make you do some really scary things.

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