One can feel love or not, depending on how you view it today.  Due to Valentine’s Day’s commercialization, today’s true meaning is likely lost in translation. 

I see the day differently and have decided to feel different about it.

Valentine’s Day is often rooted in courtly love, but I want to dig deeper and not measure this feeling from outside influences.  The pressure of the day brings a certain level of questioning into what love should look like, most notably in a loving relationship.

After twenty-seven years with the same Valentine, a few things come to mind:

In the early years of any relationship, adoration is uncomplicated. Loving someone felt simple and natural – a narrative we create that makes sense in that moment.  Even through the struggles, each person plays a role in the relationship and values what is right, familiar, and important, individually and as a couple.

When one moves forward in the relationship, years pass, experiences occur, and life lobs some absurd humor your way. Social expectations continue, yet the narrative is somehow different.  I have learned to veer off script with my Valentine in these next chapters of my life.

In the chaos of many years of change, I continue to scramble to disrupt how I see myself and my partner in those “relationship roles.”  The ways familiar and old, the comfortable no longer applies.

Loving is no longer “as easy,” and things, life, and living cannot return to how they were.  We cannot go back to what is “normal,” …even though I never like what the word normal signifies. As I surrender to my truth, the only everyday things available now are change, movement forward, and innovation.

Valentine’s Day is no longer about love, fluff, chocolates, and flowers, although my partner sent me a charcuterie board with heart-shaped cheese and salami roses.  This Hallmark holiday is another day to surrender to the truth that we must stop resisting. We need to love the unknown and love each other’s flawed nature.

Life wants to guide us; we must stop resisting and release what we know to be true.  I continue to learn that it’s never too late to start a new chapter, a new life, uproot, and take on the newness of normal. 

My partner and I started a new adventure this year, using only our intuitive nudges as the map.  We will keep open and brushing up against the discomfort of disruption, shedding our old habits and ways of being that no longer apply to this new version of our relationship.

Only curiosity today, on Valentine’s Day, comes in the box of life’s sweet new beginnings; as I emerge, I surrender my need to know what flavor my baggage is left behind, and I clear a space between me and my Valentine of twenty-seven years to come closer together yet again.  As life connects us to our earlier chapters, it makes sense again.  This is the type of heart day I want to celebrate.