nobody's Valentine

I think maybe Valentine's Day bothered me this year. Maybe it bothered me last year too and I've just forgotten, but I don't recall really caring one way or another. This year, I didn't hate it, but I think maybe I was bothered about it.

Partly as a joke to myself, I dressed all in black for Valentine's Day. (The other part is simply that those were the clothes on top of the stack.) Throughout the day, I kept singing the Smiths' "Unloveable" to myself with a slight grin—it's fun to sing, and I don't take it seriously. And I was kind of busy, I had a dental cleaning, I ran several errands around town, and went home for a late lunch, so for much of the day I just wasn't thinking about it. Then made a point of going out to Bauhaus Coffee for a while to do some work and journal writing, despite the crappy weather that made me want to stay home. And that's the clue, I think, that I was actually bothered by the idea of Valentine's Day and being single as always—I made a point of going out in public just so I wouldn't be sitting home alone, even though I was still by myself. I was also inclined toward feeling morose while there, but mostly avoided that because I was focused on my latest Dungeon World ideas.

I've found that in the past couple years, when I slide into being morose and I'm out by myself, I tend to scowl on seeing other couples. I've clearly developed some resentfulness, and that's bad. I don't like it, I don't want to be like that. But here's the interesting thing: I never feel that way or react that way toward the people I actually know. Maybe it's that being with my friends cheers me up, maybe it's that I can keep a reasonable perspective—because these morose moods are clearly unreasonable—when I'm with them, maybe it's just that it's easy to resent those you don't know, but I do not resent my friends for being in happy couples. And even when I am in one of these bad moods, if for some reason I got into conversation with a couple I didn't already know, I'd be more than just civil and I'd likely pull out of my bad mood.

That said, it has been a long lonely slog, and I'm oh so tired of it. In a way it's harder now that I have been more actively seeking out new people to meet and have been actually doing a little dating. The small successes and enjoyable times just throw the long stretches of loneliness into sharp relief. On the other hand, they also help buoy me up, they give hope that I can change the balance to more fun and happiness and less loneliness and misery.

I'm not supposed to write a blog post like this. It's self-indulgent, it's wallowing in misery instead of doing something positive to change things for the better, and of course it makes me look bad and what if someone I were interested in dating saw this. Or these are things I'm told. But I've always maintained that part of the point in having a LiveJournal, at least for me, is so that I have a way to dump all this stuff out of my head and then move on. It's not so much wallowing in misery as it is spilling that out so I'm not wallowing in it during the rest of the day. And this is part of me, part of my experience; it's honest. Anyone scared off by reading it isn't someone I'm going to want in my life. 

Of course, it does make for some schizophrenic blogging on my part: music! magic & monsters! miserable me! Hmm, maybe that should be my new tagline…