Valentine's..

or my love does cost a thing

I can’t be the only one who thinks it’s a crock of old shit? I dislike it for all the usual reasons - the idea that love can be commodified, that somehow to show you care you have to buy a special Valentine’s meal deal and generic card. I also have a problem with the arguably more inclusive practices of Galentines and Palentines. Oh, you don’t have a romantic partner? There’s still ways we can make money from you, don’t worry.

I also have more personal reasons that I find this holiday (ugh) challenging. When I discovered I was autistic I learnt about pathological demand avoidance (PDA). For me this turns up in unexpected ways. I don’t hate a deadline, for example. Often the only way that I can reliably complete a task is to have a looming date by which it must be done. That doesn’t mean I approach it in a measured, sensible way, by looking at the volume of the task and assessing the amount of work I can complete in the set number of days. Rather I will procrastinate until almost the last possible moment and then complete what must be done by using an intense amount of hyper focus and the fear of missing the target.

I am less successful when it comes to other demands. Despite my best efforts I have become almost irrationally allergic to traditional celebratory dates. I know and value at least some of these, such as the dates of my loved one’s birthdays or other important events. I know that they are coming up and I try and make plans in advance of those dates. But the part of my brain that manages when I do things convinces me that I can’t just buy them something too far in advance so I inevitably find myself, the day before a date, with nothing to show for it other than shame and panic.

Despite my date PDA related troubles there’s a certain irony borne out by the fact that I keep a collection of cards. I have a box filled with cards in their original packaging that range from birthday, to thank you, to blank to miscellaneous - my You are a penis card is definitely in a category of its own. In addition to that, I have other collections - a general memory box that contain some special cards I’ve received and other more specific boxes.

My first love has a box all of his own, complete with some choice Valentine’s he sent. Our relationship ended in 2003 and now it’s 2025 and he’s dead. Part of reviewing his box confirms, as I often have to, that the girl he knew was as autistic then as I am now. I saved the schedule I wrote the first time I planned to meet him. And now I am writing a new schedule to navigate travelling down to his memorial. I printed out and then sorted by date order, every message he ever sent me when we communicated by online message boards. I have a handful of physical rather than digital photos, as we existed in a time before that was possible.

One of the envelopes I’ve saved says:

To the girl whom means everything to me in this world, who I touch, taste, smell, see and hear - and is the very reason for my being…you are my world and everything in it. My alpha, my omega, my beginning and my ending.

How does current me, future me from that perspective, read that message? A constant through line is that I’ve always been a writer. I’ve used writing to make things stick, to process, no that’s not correct, to describe my feelings. It’s not right to say process, because in truth I don’t think I’ve ever been able to let myself feel my feelings. I don’t know if I can honestly say that I know what I am feeling most of the time. And when I write about them, when I describe them, I suspect what I am really doing is finding a way to keep them separate, to find a script of sorts that reads well, that sounds right. The more I have the script, the further away I can be.

I’m spending a lot of time at the moment, thinking about the past, thinking about love. I don’t think there are many points in my history, in my life, where I experienced unconditional love. To assess that I need to take it back to first principles. What is love? Is love something that you give, rather than receive, or both? Is it still love if it is selfish, possessive, unrequited? If love comes with limits, is it still love? Is it something you choose, or something that you have no control over? Does love have to be given freely, without expectation, in order for it to count? Does being loved, feeling loved mean that you have to be known by the person giving it to you? I don’t have any answers, just endless questions.

As a child, I grew up learning that love, if that’s what it was, was conditional. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, that praise, positive attention, being rewarded, was conditional. Is that the same as love? If I performed the correct behaviour, didn’t display too much emotion, achieved the right grades, I would gain a small amount of attention, followed by the message that next time I must do even better. Love was always something I needed to work for, there was always a moving future target that had to be met to justify its continued existence. Or if love means that I was always given enough, food, sufficient shelter and later, financial assistance to get me out of whatever hole I had dug myself into, then yes, I was loved.

If I can say anything for sure, I know that love is confusing. Perhaps that is an obvious statement. My experience with love was frequently inconsistent, contradictory, irrational and unreliable. When I was 11 or 12 and at boarding school for the first time, a boy who had the surname Fok, became obsessed with me. He would follow me around everywhere, into the girls’ toilets and loudly declare his love for me. I was utterly mortified. His version of love was loud, insistent and intensely embarrassing. When he presented me with his Valentine’s card in one of our classes, in full display of all my peers, I wanted to sink down into the deepest, darkest hole of shame. I hated him with all my being. I hated his attention, I hated his certainty, I hated the fact that I could never get away from him. One night, he joined a doubles match, across the net from me, I couldn’t consume my rage. To silence his messy, public declarations I threw my tennis racket at him and hit him perfectly on his head. From what I know, he ended up in A&E with a concussion and then later returned after drinking a bottle of shampoo, such was his anguish. Fok me.

So, no, there is no neat way of wrapping this up.

I sit with my questions, and wonder about love, trying not to throw my metaphorical racket at St Valentine’s.