Red Hearts Day

So here we are at Valentine's Day again. I hate Valentine's Day. I don't know about you but this is the worst holiday ever invented. I guess if all you have gotten for Valentine's Day was diamonds, rubies and more diamonds then you might feel differently but after a lifetime of disappointing and borderline ridiculous Valentine's experiences, I have a completely opposite opinion. I feel that this is the most awkward display used to celebrate love imaginable and has no bearing on the reality of relationships whatsoever. Just another false commercial Hallmark moment for the consumer in all of us. Meant to delight and amaze but generally achieving a lot less. Perhaps this is not the case but nevertheless I remain just as bitter and cynically abused by this stupid holiday every year. How does it go? Either, I give him his gift and he gives me a look of complete horror, makes up some kind of lame excuse and rushes out the door, appearing later with an over the top gift, a giant stuffed apology. Or he says that my gift is in the mail and hasn't arrived yet. Or how about this one, "So what do you want to do today?" I have learned that it is really not that exciting and that if he does plan something, it usually ends up as disaster. I remember our very first Valentine's Day. We were dating at the time and he didn't call me the entire day. He didn't make any plans at all with me and so when one of my other friend's called me and asked if I would have dinner with him that evening, I agreed. At dinner time, I was all dressed up and nearly out the door when he calls and asks me what I want to do that evening. I told him that I already had plans to go out for dinner with someone else because I wasn't going to wait around all night for him. Then I went to dinner. And so it goes.

And who can forget standing in the card aisle choosing the perfect heartfelt card for your guy and then you get their card and on the front is a picture of an old, fat, unshaven cupid in a diaper with some cheesy line. So I stand by my sentiment and would love to shout it from the rooftops. I hate Valentine's Day!!!

I was listening to the radio today and discovered to my own amazement that a lot of those radio love songs out there don't affect me anymore like they used to. I now realize that all of this teenage love bebop is really not about love at all. Instead, it is about some weird infatuation that gets mixed up with a passion for swoony croony melodies that perhaps would have made my heart skip a few beats when I was young and naive. I now know what all of this is about; it is a love of the music. However, this gets confusing for a lot of people, especially the young and impressionable. I adamantly believe that this is where a lot of teenage pregnancy begins. Simple, foolish love songs on the radio combined with cheap wine and ending in a moment of weakness. Just had to put that out there. Maybe it is subliminal, a bunch of sappy crappy love gibberish written by boys to help boys get some. And we fall for it, us girls. Hoping beyond hope that our guy would utter the same nancy lines.

Now here's another topic:

Is it just me or are the men of our generation highly lacking when it comes to maturity/responsibility? It is as though now that the women have their own careers these guys don't feel a sense of importance anymore so they are just resorting back to acting like whiny teenagers. Maybe they don't feel like they need to be responsible because we girls do everything anyway so they don't need to do anything any more. Like now that even the financial responsibility has been taken over by the women, they don't have anything else to do, so they just play Xbox all day. I know because mine has absolutely no hobbies and really no other existence besides work. I think that if they aren't the sole financial providers anymore then men don't know what to do with themselves. They become irrelevant.

I just thought that I would post this because it seems to be a major issue. I am really having difficulty understanding why the men of this generation seem so lazy/boring/immature. Where are the brazen heroes of times past who would ride off so debonair to war, the Bravehearts and the Lancelots? Have the men of our generation lost their place? It used to be that the man went out and provided for his family, hunted and gathered, the main breadwinner, where the woman stayed home with the children and never the two would mix. Now the women are working and the men are expected to help out in the home, it is as though his main instincts are being insulted when he has to change a diaper or wash the dishes, so in a way, he is laying seige to this new order in his own semi rebellion, refusing to get up off the couch and insisting on becoming the biggest slob in the universe.

To me, I just think that they have nothing to fight for anymore. I think men are born to rescue and they are in their element when they have to work hard and fight for their beliefs and families. I think that now that the struggle has gone out of it, their fight for life has been disabled and their motivation along with it. So in stark contrast to life in the middle of the dirty thirties and the Great Depression, where men were desperately slaving themselves to the bone in the work camps just to keep their families alive, we now end up with these men who don't really have a sense of themselves as strong, capable and heroic because the women can do all of that for themselves now. Rather than times where the woman wasn't able to find work that would sustain herself and her family, now we insist on doing it all and the man begins to feel not only intimidated but also kind of useless, thereby becoming exactly that. I know that I always see a substantial change in my husband whenever he goes off up north to work in the sub zero temperatures, as though it makes him feel like more of a man. A man off to do whatever it takes to provide for his family while I am here watching the homestead. He would actually prefer it if I didn't go back to work. Of course he would also prefer the double income. :) Who wouldn't right about now.