The greatest love of all

Ebony, Feb, 1994 by Laura B. Randolph

It's here. Or at least it soon will be. That 24-hour period in which women without a man in their lives suffer a peculiary acute form of the crazies. Think PMS but on speed. It, of course, is Valentine's Day.

Have you ever noticed how, on February 14th, sisters all over the country -- we're talking vital, intelligent women who routinely bring home the bacon and fry it tip in the pan -- suddenly turn into walking puddles of insecurity and need?

Take, for instance, my friend Carla. Carla is an uncommonly accomplished sister -- an attorney who negotiates million-dollar deals, flies to the coast (pick one) for lunch, then orders in French when she gets there. Oh yeah, she's also meltingly beautiful.

On V-Day, however, if Carla isn't in a relationship, she refuses to get out of bed, never mind think about going to work. "It's too depressing watching all those balloon and flower deliveries," says this woman who has a face and figure that looks like Jayne Kennedy-meets-Dorothy Dandridge. "Besides, I've run out of bogus tales of romantic bliss every time somebody asks me what I'm doing for the evening."

Carla isn't alone. Her aerobic instructor, Lisa, a sister so health-conscious she reads the cholesterol count on rice cakes, grows despondent because she won't be receiving a 10-pound assortment of Godiva chocolates.

On the eve of such madness, any attempt at rational discussion is useless. For Carla, Lisa and thousands of other sisters without a man in their life, Valentine's Day seems less a celebration of love in all its variations than a worldwide conspiracy to remind them that they are alone -- manless, matchless singles in a world made for couples.

It does no good to point out the facts: that teachers, not lovers, are the No. 1 recipients of valentines. That the day is not only -- or even primarily -- for lovers. (Hallmark now makes 2,000 different Valentine's Day cards because, as the company point out, "a growing number of people see it as a time for friends and family to share love and affection.") And, least known but most surprising, most Valentine's Day gifts are purchased by women.

Facts are no match for emotion. And there is nothing more emotional than a sister who hasn't had a serious relationship since the '80s watching the woman across the hall watering her long-stemmed roses. Everything good about single life -- from the do-as-you-please-freedom to the toilet seat that's always where you left it -- has a way of evaporating when the third balloon bouquet is delivered to the office next door.

The real problem, of course, isn't the flowers, the candy or the balloons. The problem is what these loving expressions of affection say ("There's nothing like being in love") to people who are not ("See what you're missing?").

As anyone who has been there knows, when you are going through a dating drought, when you are without even the promise of a blind date with your neighbor's barber's third cousin's best friend, romance and its heady euphoria is the last thing you want to think about.

Of course, that's exactly what V-Day makes you recall: the exhilaration, the sweet intoxication, the nothing-comes-close-to-it rush you get when men are clamoring to date you. Not floating on a raft in the Caribbean, not breakfasts of mangoes and mimosas, not even calling in sick and discovering there's a Denzel Washington film festival on cable and two unopened quarts of Haagen-Dazs in the refrigerator.

That said, however, the idea that our value is measured by the number of balloons we receive on Valentine's Day isn't just emotionally crippling. It's exactly what those colorful balls of helium will be in two days time: nothing but gas and air.

No one believes more than I that love sweetens your life -- immeasurably when you get it right. But its absence should never be allowed to diminish it, to make you feel because you aren't part of a couple you are somehow "less."

Coming to this realization can be difficult, but it is also profoundly liberating as more and more sisters who are discovering its essential truth are coming to see. Because when you love yourself, your happiness never depends on what others think of you, on how impressive your job/house/friends are to the rest of the world. Or on how many balloons you get on Valentine's Day.

If this sounds like so much New Age nonsense, it's not. I'll never forget the day I sat with Halle Berry in the den of her Atlanta home and she told me about her long and painful journey to self-love.

Before she married David Justice, the drop-dead gorgeous outfielder for baseball's Atlanta Braves, she said she wanted "sincere love from a man" so badly, she searched for it in all the wrong places. Invariably, she ended up with all the wrong men, men who abused her physically and emotionally.

It took several difficult relationships before she realized she didn't need a man to validate her. That the only person whose approval she needed was the woman whose face stared back at her in the mirror. That the greatest love of all comes from within. And just look what life has brought her!