Custodio: Love and the Valentine syndrome

Custodio: Love and the Valentine syndrome

IT’S funny. Whenever Valentine’s Day is coming, I see friends going through the motions of feeling love and loss. I go through the same thing myself actually, and it is quite amusing to observe such kind of emotions coming to the surface prior to the day of hearts!

This usually happens a week before Valentine’s. I get private messages from friends who start feeling either sadness or a growing feeling of excitement as the 14th approaches. As days pass, I get updates from them, as well as invitations for drinking sessions and inquiries about gift ideas, flower shops and romantic restaurants that serve good food that won’t break the bank! Honestly, it’s the sad ones who really keep me posted about their concerns and it has been happening steadily over the years that I’ve started referring to it as the Valentine Syndrome. Seriously, I can relate to their concerns too.

Valentine’s Day is such a big deal, people prepare for it! We expect the traffic, the meteoric rise of flower prices, and restaurants as well as hotels (and the like) being fully booked! Commercialism truly comes alive during this time! I was at the Bankerohan Market at midday to buy my Mom roses and it was pure chaos in the flower stands! And don’t get me started with trying to get sweets to go with the bouquet! I had to wait a while to get cake!

The world wide web isn’t any different from real life, either. Online entrepreneurs have been posting their Valentine offerings as early as the last week of January. (I kept getting tagged that’s why I know.) Did you notice how the posts increase as the 14th nears? I know that we all expect it! We await the overflow of funny, romantic and heartbreaking memes, hugot lines, videos and stories online too!

So much ado about celebrating love, right? And I think with good reason! Love is such a huge thing it will never be a white elephant in the room! Its presence will always be felt, whether it makes one feel happy or sad. It will never cease to affect people, especially on February 14.

As for love, it will be what it is and will stay true to what it means to all of us. Love is everything that you hope and not hope it would be. It is heaven when it’s right and both of you are in love. It is hell when things go wrong and in love alone. You can cry out of sheer joy or weep out of pain. In love all things are possible. It doesn’t matter which side you’re on. What matters is that you’ve loved than never at all.

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