Valentine’s Day, 1984. Third grade. I was dressed in my finest: a magenta, velour gem sweater, hair perfect in its best Diana Ross frizz, and my favorite sweatpants with paint splatters. I was a vision, and Scott Newland had noticed. Nearly toothless with patchy blond hair and ears that went for miles, he was my dream, my love, the only boy who could fill me with such poignancy as I played my Flashdance record over and over. As he walked towards me, I feigned boredom. But in his hand I saw it—the Holy Grail for every nine-year-old love-smitten fool. The Valentine. I smiled at him as he dropped it on my desk. He snorted, not terribly uncommon considering that he seemed eternally cursed by some sort of post-nasal flood.
“Thank you.” I put on my best coquettish grin.
“My mom made me.” Snort.
And then he walked away. Wounded, but not defeated, I ripped open the Valentine to find that not only did it not contain some borrowed poetry from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he hadn’t even signed it. I tried not to cry as my friend Renee walked up to me and set a gorgeous, candy-filled card on my desk. I mumbled a “thanks” as I blindly stuffed Red Hots and candy conversation hearts into my mouth.
“I love your hair.”
Mouth stained red, I looked up at her and realized, at the tender age of nine, that girlfriends are the only reliable sweet spot in a cold, cruel world.
Twenty-four years later, not much has changed. My adolescence was a blur of rejection and horror, but through it all, my girls were always at my side and always willing to split a bag of chocolates on a particularly depressing February 14. College and a forty-pound weight loss improved things, but I never could shake the feeling that my friends had always been there, whereas boys came and went. Despite improvements in my social life, Valentine’s Day became a holiday for partying with friends.
At first, it was just a rebellion, a little “F-you” to a world that despised fatties and wallflowers—I happened to be both. But by my mid-twenties, that had changed. It seemed that people focused on spouses and lovers 365 days a year, frittering away their time and efforts to be more attractive and more desirable to prospective mates who would never be as loyal as their friends.
I know no one in my life has been there so steadfastly as my nearest and dearest—my two best friends. These two people have been my wailing walls through heartbreaking relationships, my crutch through major life-threatening surgeries, my back up during a wedding ceremony surrounded by hostile in-laws, and the source of all my jokes and laughter. It was time to give them a day where they were pampered and made to feel special … just because they were good friends.
And so Valentine’s Day was resurrected for me. The three of us would send our significant others packing for the evening. That was easy enough for Renee and I—yes, the same girl from the third grade—but for Aaron, my other best friend, it was a trial. Boyfriends became strangely possessive, but any jealousy was tempered by a feeling of relief that they wouldn’t have to buy a gift.
As for girlfriends, that’s another story. It didn’t matter, we figured it out somehow. We would plan our night with a care that rivaled the most tender of lovers. Booking the finest restaurants months in advance, dressing to the nines, and buying gifts that reflected our decades of knowledge about each other, we would set out together on the oddest of romantic ventures.
There aren’t any movies about love stories between friends and the way those relationships evolve. But just like any love story, there’s a honeymoon period, an adjustment that might end the relationship entirely, and then eventually, a very complex web of memories and emotions that cement you together as much as any old married couple. My best friend Renee could not look more dissimilar, and yet strangers who meet us for the first time often mistake us for sisters. People who meet Renee for the first time remark on the creepiness of similarity in our voices, facial expressions, and demeanor. Despite the obvious differences, the years have molded us together in such a way that our physical features seem eerily similar, at least to everyone else.
