While it is true that Valentine’s Day tends to enrich card companies and chocolate manufacturers, and to enforce all kinds of apallingly patriarchal, heteronormative views of love and relationships, I celebrate it with some enthusiasm in my own subversive way. Here’s why: My first year of law school was difficult, and by February 14th I was seriously dragging. My first semester grades had been good but not great, I didn’t have a summer job lined up yet, and though I had gotten over the fear of being called on in classes, this allowed me to notice how boring and disjointed some of them were. The long slog through the rest of the semester loomed interminably, and I knew that the only respite from the tedium would be the reoccurring fear of finals. I was too heinously depressed to even buy myself some chocolate. Then I went to my student mailbox, which was really just a hanging folder, and found an unexpected valentine, from a casual law school friend, and by casual I mean completely and unambiguously platonic. It was just a small, extremely inexpensive valentine of the sort children buy in bulk to exchange with classmates, and it featured a smilling cartoon bumble bee with the legend “Bee Mine” or some equally silly pun, but it completely and profoundly brightened my day. Now every year I inflict same on others – cheap valentines, bad puns, and brightened days.
–Ann Bartow