Earliest known pictorial representation of Saint Valentine, from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)
I look back on Valentine's Day when I was a boy in elementary school, with something less than genuine fondness.
You remember the drill: your mother would buy you a package of mass-produced valentines, and you had to address one to each of your classmates (girl or boy), even the ones you hated. Every one of your classmates had to send you a valentine, even the ones who hated you. And at the end of the day, you came home with an armload of mass-produced valentines and threw them into the trash.
I used to wonder what was the point of this annual forest-destroying exercise.
A few years ago I was talking on the telephone to my mother, and she told me that when she was a child, you sent valentines only to the classmates you liked. What a concept.
It’s not too hard to imagine what happened here. Sometime between my mother’s childhood and mine, I guess one mom too many called up and complained “My little Jimmy/Susie didn’t get a single valentine, boo hoo hoo,” and the principal threw up his hands in exasperation and exclaimed, “Okay, that’s it! From now on, EVERYBODY has to send EVERBODY ELSE a valentine!”
The problem with this kind of thinking is it’s like trying to get rich by printing more money. That doesn’t make anyone richer – all it does is devalue the currency in question, whether we are talking about dollars or valentines.
Not that I’m blaming our public school principals and teachers. They have an impossible job. I sometimes think our public schools exist only to illustrate the maxim, “Try to please everyone, and you will please no one.”
But what if these parents had chosen to treat this situation as a teachable moment? “Do you want to be better liked? What do you think you could do to be better liked?”
Or, an even better question: “Does it really matter?”
I used to spent time on Yahoo! Answers, and occasionally young girls would write in and ask, “What can I do to be one of the popular kids?” I would always tell them the same thing: “Don’t worry about it. Just hang out with the people you like and do the things you like. Then the other kids will look at you and say, ‘Gee, I wish I were one of the popular kids, like her.’”
I realize this kind of thinking is going to be seen as unforgivably reactionary and Neanderthal, in an era in which everything is someone else’s fault, and no human interaction is too trivial to be policed by the state. But I fear that we are raising a generation of kids who will grow up lacking the inner resources to deal with even the smallest adversity. Face it, worse things will happen to you in life than not receiving any valentines.
Illustration via Wikimedia Commons
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Richard Rider
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