Valentine's Day Thoughts

From the Facebook posts I've been seeing, you'd think that Valentine's Day started six weeks ago.  o.0

Back at my old high school, I had a good friend in my creative writing class and every day we would skip to class together.  At one point during the semester she developed a romantic attachment to another friend of mine, and they liked to smooch.  So every day after seventh period, I would jog in circles around them while they smooched in the middle of the commons, and when they were finished I would link arms with my skipping buddy and we'd skip to class.

Yes, I had a strange childhood.

I observed them over the weeks with an odd feeling in my stomach as they cuddled and smooched and bought roses and teddy bears for each other, and then they suddenly broke up one day.  My poor skipping buddy was in tears, her swashbuckling smooching buddy seemed no worse for the wear, and a little voice in my head was saying to me, "I knew this was going to happen."

The next year I met a girl whose presence made me feel like I was flying on a rainbow cloud with a bottomless bowl of golden ice cream, and I seriously considered asking her to be my girlfriend.  Actually, I'm not sure I even really considered it.  I just really, really wanted to be her boyfriend.  The only thing that held me back was a commitment I made the year before to not have a girlfriend until I come back from my mission and start looking for someone to marry.

Here's my thinking.  I expect that at age 21 (or maybe up to a few years after age 21), I will take an awesome woman to the temple and we will be married together for time and all eternity.  Done right, that love will grow stronger and deeper every single year--deeper than any teenager will ever know.  If I have a girlfriend in high school and then break up with her, in twenty years I won't have anything to show for it.  I will look back at that period of time and think, "That was really lame.  I should've done something else with my time."  If I have a girlfriend in high school and we don't break up, I run the risk of having my first child early, and that would throw my plans for the next several years out the window. There is the possibility that I could marry my "high school sweetheart", as some happily married couples I know have done, but the odds of that working out in this crazy generation are low enough that I don't want to try for it.

There's another side to my opinion of Valentine's Day that I haven't been able to find words to express adequately, so I was grateful to find this quote floating around:

“I am satisfied that happiness in marriage is not so much a matter of romance as it is an anxious concern for the comfort and well-being of one’s companion. Any man who will make his wife’s comfort his first concern will stay in love with her throughout their lives and through the eternity yet to come.”
-Gordon B. Hinckley

That echoes my philosophy pretty well.  From where I'm sitting, romance seems to be awfully glorified in today's world, but it doesn't make the relationship much stronger.  Romance and love are different things and they're too often confused.

I think that sums it up.

I am shamelessly waiting a few years to select my one and only Valentine.  I'm not interested in this Singles Awareness Day thing either, because I have friends to keep me company.  I'm single, but I'm not alone.

'Twould be nice to get some extra candy, though... Ah well, 'tis the price I pay for my way.