Feb 14

February 14th, Valentine’s Day, is one of those days that mark our lives, one of those annual events—like Birthdays and Christmas—that should sparkle like bright lights on the calendars of our biographies. After all, Feb 14 comes every year without fail and once we are old enough to appreciate it we know that we can’t miss it.
But so many of us these days have such messed-up relationships that the day has become a remembrance of things past rather than a present and future hope. There was Futhi, remember, and Mandla, and Nosiwe, and Sizwe… and who was it I was with last year?
Flowers flying ‘cross the room
vases smashed against the floor
said ‘I’d rather be alone—
take your chocolates and go home.’

Be my Valentine.
Be my Valentine.
Be my Valentine.

That’s a verse and chorus from ‘Feb 14’ by a contemporary band, the Drive-by-Truckers. In another song of theirs, ‘A World of Hurt’, a world-weary voice declares,
To love is to feel pain, there ain’t no way around it
the very nature of love is to grieve when it’s over
the secret to a happy ending is knowing when to roll the credits
better roll them now before anything else goes wrong’
Yep, Valentine’s Day is not what it’s cracked up to be when our society is itself cracked up.
Our papers are full of stories about some husband beating or hacking his wife or of some man thumping his girlfriend or of two women scratching and clawing each other over some man or of some minister losing his shoes because of a makhwapheni. It used to be Cupid’s arrows, but today’s lovers use sticks and boiling water and knobkerries and fists and even knives—bruises and scars are the new gifts of love; the stories used to be of teddy bears and panties and perfume and bright red hearts. Now every heart bleeds.
What happens to romance these days? A couple meet, fall in love, get all over each other, move in together, have a child, get married… and then hate each other. As the joke-which-is-not-a-joke puts it, marriage is a romantic novel where the hero dies in the first chapter. Our love songs now are about falling out of love:
It seems that we’ve run out of words of praise
There’s nothing left for us to say
in the beginning there was lust
but now the thrill has gone away
you had my heart but now I want it back
we’re nothing more than friends
and when I take a closer look at us
I know we’re heading towards the end

Falling
yes we’re falling
falling… out of love.
The manufacturers are still making the heart-shaped cards and the cute teddies and the heart-shaped chocolates, but love—like the roses we send each other—just isn’t built to last. Our passion ends up dry and withered, shrivelled and wasted like last week’s flowers.
Music especially reflects the collective aspirations, outlooks, hopes and dreams of a culture, and if you listen to what we’re singing, you’ll realise that romance is dead. Yes, there are plenty of bedroom songs—one favourite in the clubs right now has a verse/chorus that goes:
I know you see me looking at you and you already know
I wanna f*** you
you already know I wanna f*** you.
The tune is actually quite sing-a-long and the lazy beat is seductive; but it sure isn’t romance.