Just to be clear: I don’t like Valentine’s Day.
Never have. It’s just another made up event encouraging people to spend, spend, spend.
Plus, I’ve never actually had a good V-Day, even if I’ve been in a relationship. Never. A bit like New Year’s Eve, it’s generally a fizzer, I find…
And if I was at all superstitious (I’m not), I’d probably say I cursed Valentine’s Day for myself, long ago.
Coz the last time it was Friday 13th before Valentines Day, I was about fifteen and I broke someone’s heart.
Life had moved on since N. Sorta. I mean, still, no one talked about it. I was ashamed of what happened, though I didn’t know why. I muddled along…
And despite my general broken-heartedness, I’d somehow ended up with another boyfriend, T.
He went to my school but I’d never noticed him ’til one of my friends did.
T’s friends were nerds (I was in the ‘weird/outer’ group with links to the nerds and the popular kids), and if it wasn’t for his tall, dark ‘n’ handsome good looks and sporting prowess, he would’ve been considered a nerd, too.
But my friend P noticed him, and I realised – yeah, he is cute. Somehow P and I both got invited to his birthday – a co-ed pool party in his backyard.
We played childish games meant to titillate, as in the pic below… (T is the guy, my friend P is the girl). Getting so close and personal at that age was endless amusement.
And throwing pretty girls in the pool…
And then there was Truth or Dare, played out with a bunch of us in the pool.
T took a dare and was dared to kiss me (guess his friends knew he liked me). Embarrassing, in front of a mixed crowd, but we did kiss… I have no idea why he liked me instead of P (to my mind she was much prettier).
After the party I was wondering… hmm, how to get to see him again? Someone suggested the old ‘scary movie’ trick. Y’know… sit next to the cute guy and lean towards him when things get scary. I invited him to come and see Alien with me.
It worked.
Before long, we were hanging out. Optimistically, he tried to teach me tennis (yeah… ummm… I tried to tell him how clumsy I am). More hanging out at school, after school, playing touch footy, swimming in his pool…
Then, there was a date at the roller-disco skating rink (think 80’s, Nutbush City Limits and Time Warp played without fail) – I borrowed my sister’s zebra stripe singlet and matched it with my denim mini, prompting my parents to label me ‘jail bait’ before I walked out the door (where was their common sense??).
T was gentlemanly to a fault though. We’d only kissed a few times. But that date was sort of our ‘coming out’ to our school mates as a couple. T was bailed up by some guy wanting to know if we’d rooted yet (terrible Aussie slang!).
Sadly, T’s fatal mistake (for our relationship) was relaying that conversation to me. Between the lines, I realised that he was hoping for sex. Not straight away, but at some point. Soonish.
I couldn’t do it.
We’d been going out for a few months, from the end of the year and over most of summer. February was approaching and I was getting more and more worried. Unlike N, T never pressured me. But just the expectation was enough.
He sensed something was up. I wanted to tell him, I did… but I still felt pretty bad about everything that’d happened, and I just couldn’t share it.
So I broke up with him in the playground ’round the corner from both our houses after school. He, with his friend D in tow, and me with my best friend, M. He cried.
He’d been thinking about ‘us’ as a long term thing, while I’d just been trying to get through the day.
His little sister cried too, so I was told when we met up the next day (V-Day), at his insistence. He’d written me a letter, and stubbornly gave me the card he’d made (with his little sister’s help) and a necklace, packaged in a box on which he’d drawn a heart and written Don’t open unless you’re my Valentine.
But I had to open it anyway, feeling guilty and horrible… because he asked me to.
The letter (long since discarded, it made me feel too guilty) said, amongst other things, perhaps it was the force of evil that tore us apart on Friday the 13th, but I’m hoping the power of Valentine’s Day can overcome that and we can get back together.
We didn’t, though. I couldn’t.
T left my high school to go to a private boys’ school – guess his parents thought it gave him a better shot at higher education or something.
I saw him once a couple of years later, working in the local video store for extra cash. He was happy, had a girlfriend.
Somehow I’ve never forgotten him. I see that sweet, brief relationship as an innocent victim of the fall-out from my first boyfriend. Often I’ve wished I could find him (Facebook turns up nothing on T, but plenty of other people I wasn’t friends with at school) to apologise (tho he’s probably long forgotten me by now).
Because I never got to tell him why I’d broken up with him. That it had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the sad little wounded Self I was carrying around. And that in fact, he’d been a great boyfriend, a really gorgeous boyfriend. Possibly, I’d even felt like he was too good for me.
In the end though, it was the expectation of sex, and my inability to trust him with what I considered my ‘horrible’ story… that caused me to end things inexplicably.
But he never got to hear any of that from me.
~Svasti
You never know– maybe he just did. 🙂
Hope to see your mood meter back to calm again soon.
Oh that was a mix of sweet and sad at the same time. I will have to catch up with your story, we may have something in common I think. Thanks for you comment on my blog and yor picture was amazing.
this made me sadder than the traumatic story…I don’t know why exactly…and oddly enough while I told you I was afraid the last would trigger me and it ended up not doing so…this one perhaps did a little…but don’t allow that to make you feel bad…I just so totally relate…and my emotions from all my life’s trauma’s are so ready to come to the surface being that I’m done with the numbing…that it’s inevitable and necessary even…so it’s okay.
I didn’t let nice guys get close to me for decades…maybe I’m still mourning that.
Those sad wounded selfs’ll getcha every time, won’t they? Valentine’s Day sucks…all about bogus expectations…like New Years Eve but worse…then you’re just supposed to have an outrageous partying good time…while Valentine’s Day, you’re supposed to experience true love…or something…though, presumably, if you’ve already got it, you don’t need a special day for it, and if you don’t already got it…it’s pretty unlikely you’re gonna make it happen on February 14…what your poor broken hearted T didn’t get is that there’s no “magic” on Valentine’s Day that isn’t there any other day…just the bullshit expectation….I once heard someone from some country in the Middle East say how ridiculous Mother’s Day was (don’t know if you even have that in Australia)…only one day of the year to express appreciation for your mother?! And how much more ludicrous Valentine’s Day is, then…if we actally need a “love day,” that just show’s what sorry shape we’re in….
.if we actally need a “love day,” that just show’s what sorry shape we’re in….
I thought it was pretty clear that we as a people and culture are in sorry shape…
@tricia – Yeah maybe, but I think its unlikely. At any rate, this is about as public as I’ve ever been with an appology to him…
@Lilly – You’re welcome, nice to get to know another Aussie blogger. And your story of the Canberra fires was incredible.
@giannakali – Ah yes, I did a good job of staying away from nice guys too, for the longest time. I guess I didn’t think I deserved them or something!
It is hard, isn’t it, coming back from being numb into the world of feeling? In the long run its a good thing, even if it feels very crappy for a while.
@Jay – its true, bogus ‘special days’ royally suck. I mean, I think it can be nice to enjoy going out with someone you love, but that particular day has never worked out for me like that. Then, I don’t think I’m a particularly conventional person.
It’s true, there’s no magic in V-Day but for T, it must have been a slim hope… there’d been no obvious signs I was gonna dump him, but I did. For reasons I didn’t share.
Definitely, sharing and displaying love should be an every day experience, not saved up for once a year!
Yep, we have Mother’s Day (& Father’s Day) here, and same… I’ve never really understood. Although, since we as a people tend to take each other for granted, perhaps its not such a bad thing, just for the sake of awareness? But making it a commercial venture with expectations attached… that bit sucks.
@giannakali – perhaps, yeah… we are in a sorry state. But perhaps also there’s hope that we can improve…
I have bad memories of past V-days too and sort of hate it. I never actively hated Valentine’s day–you know–built a shrine and cast dark magic, drawing every droplet of hatred from my soul in hating it LOL!
I did write a general love poem–probably the lone positivity on my site. I almost wrote one about heartache, but couldn’t resist the ascension. Would you really want to tell him this after all this time? It’s so funny; I broke up with a girl I really loved in junior college because she offered real love–and I was scared of that. I saw her a decade later and told her I had made a mistake. She said she had no idea who I was. So strange . . . and I thought I had the upper hand in my immature little brain.
What a poignant post. I have never been a fan of V-Day myself.
I can totally relate to how a ‘sad, wounded self’ can stop one from allowing so many good things from happening. I was like that too but now I’d like to think I have let go of the ‘sad and wounded’ part of me.
Wishing you peace, joy and light… every day. 🙂
@Bobby – You’re right, I don’t know if I’d really like to have that conversation now. Although I’d like to have had it then.
@flawedangel – that’s true, everyone has to make a decision on whether their ‘sad wounded little self’ is gonna keep ruining the day, each and every day. Or if we’re gonna say enough is enough and move forwards, but properly and not in denial. Wishing you peace as well 🙂