the valentine hangover

Three days after Valentine, the prices of flowers have gone down. Most of those lovely bouquets in office desks (to impress the officemates) and in living rooms (to impress the neighbors) have wilted and gone to trash. Jilted suitors wonder why they bought a dozen long-stemmed roses at 600 pesos on Monday, when on Wednesday the same dozen costs 150 pesos, and regretfully think of all the beers they could have bought. And pretty sixteen-year-olds would have a half dozen additions to their collection-- teddy bears clutching little pink hearts printed with sugary sentiments like ‘You’re in my heart!’

I refused to write this on Valentine’s Day because it’s pretty much sensationalized anyway, and it’s so… juvenile to moan about how much love there is on that day. But then I was going to write about Valentine flowers.

When I was in college, Valentine’s Day was characterized by dozens of flower vendors along the streets of University Belt. And in the afternoon, when most of the classes ended, the sidewalks would be thronged with young men clutching flowers, some of them hidden in brown paper bags (the flowers, not the men), some of them proudly holding a bouquet, waiting for their girlfriends or girlfriends-to-be to emerge from the university gates. The girls would come out, freshly powdered, and take their flowers, then allow the boys to peck their cheeks and carry their books. The ones who got bigger bunches of flowers would of course walk prouder, and they’d look around to see who noticed. And the unlucky ones who had neither suitors nor boyfriends would try to slink past those damned blushing girls.

I was one of the unlucky ones. I didn’t really mind, and I wouldn’t buy myself a rose just so I wouldn’t go home empty-handed.

Then I had this professor in a Psychology class who had what I thought was a brilliant idea. We were discussing things like self-esteem and complexes and group dynamics, and his class fell on Valentine’s Day. He made us bring three red roses to class. Then we gave one rose to the person you’d like to know better, one rose to the one you liked most, and one rose to the one you liked least. And since you weren’t supposed to tell whether you liked the person or not, we ended up assuming the rose we received was for being liked most. I remember that there wasn’t a person in class who was not holding at least two roses at the end of the exercise. I also remembered that there were quite a few loveteams that were made on that class.

And the roses felt good. And I thought I understood the roses on Valentine’s Day. They reaffirmed all the good feelings associated with love. You understand your worth, you feel important, you feel desirable, you feel special. At the most basic level, you feel appreciated. And isn’t being appreciated one of the most important emotional needs of a person?

Valentine roses when you were young and beautiful makes happy memories when you’re middle-aged. But I don’t think that we unlucky ones became nymphomaniacs or something like that just because we did not receive roses on Valentine’s Day in college. For whatever it’s worth, I think it made us appreciate love as we grew older, in forms more subtle and more complex than roses.

I think some of us planted our own gardens and beautified our own souls, instead of waiting for men to give us flowers. I think some of us became wonderful women, and some of us gave our all for love.

And well, of course, some of us bought ourselves chocolates.