How About Dedicating This Valentine To The Ex!

2023 NatGeo spoke of the Origins of Valentine's Day. NYT probed the Lupercalia. Tell Your Partner You Love Them – Everyday suggested The Guardian. Closer home a fash-mag asked How Queer-Friendly is Valentine's Day while a few other regulars harped on the commerce and romantic chaos with write-ups on 50 gifting ideas, 14 ways to express love and 33 local V-Day events guide! 

Clearly, the day is dedicated to love – the sugary, syrupy, honey-glaze kind oozing amorous ardour. You can’t help but feel it in your fingers and toes. Love is all around you, counting in the quote-unquote friendship slash Gallentine slash HappyVDayHappyMeDay type too. 

Turning all this on its head for a change, what happens if we dedicate February 14, 2024 to our exes! Like seriously girl! Consider it for a sec -- yes, the person you love the most also hurt you the most, there were tears, pain, heartbreak and a sense of deep loss. It was gnawing grief with a capital G. But for those of us who doggedly crawled our way through all of that darkness to emerge on the other side of the sus spectrum, there were invaluable lessons too isn’t it? For the fighters, the survivors then – 

 “If you can dream 

With a damaged mind

And love with a broken heart,

You deserve this world

And all of its treasures” 

As for the lessons we learnt along the way, let’s raise our champagne glasses to our exes this Valentine's Day and share some of those love learnings. 

Learning#1: Self Love - Serendipity or what that Flowers just happens to be Record of the Year 2024! 

I can buy myself flowers

Write my name in the sand

Talk to myself for hours

Say things you don’t understand

I can take myself dancing

And I can hold my own hand

Yeah, I can love me better that you can…

Yeah, you bet you can and you have by letting go, by choosing peace, by embracing the self instead of holding on to anger, grief and fear. You chose to heal YOU, even though you felt trapped in negativity, struggled to cope with basics, even friends and family felt draining and you just wanted to escape life itself. 

Learning #2: Boundaries – Taylor Swift’s Lavender Haze from the award-winning Album of the Year Midnights talks about “protecting” deep love from the outside world. Coincidence much?

Goes for every kind of love girl. You learnt to set boundaries and fiercely guard your self-love because you are no longer caught in the “think that they care, and care what they think” trap. Rejection, doubt, anxiety, alienation, frustration and guilt do not emotionally trigger you anymore. Like they say, “you’ve trained your mind to be stronger than your feelings and your boundaries to be stronger than your empathy.” 

Having grown mentally and emotionally you got harder to manipulate, you no longer over-commit, self-neglect, entertain self-critical thoughts or have difficulty saying no. You own your Lavender Haze girl! 

Learning #3: Red Flag Alert

Flags, the “noticeable and more subtle characteristics of a person” come in basically two colours red and green, but now there’s beige too. It can get quite confusing and like Grammy winner Billy Eilish you may have once questioned What Was I Made For. Not anymore. If anybody can literally intuit a red flag you can thanx to the ex. 

The “perfectly matched” online soulmate connection can no longer fool you. A relationship is now more about building trust, nurturing bonds, respecting boundaries, sharing positive experiences and fulfilling needs. 

In fact, this hard-earned peace is so crucial to you that you’ve come to normalize leaving at the first red flag now! You know you deserve the whole deal physical, emotional, experiential, intellectual, spiritual and self-intimacy in your relationship. 

Learning #4: The Little Things

A smile. A touch. A cuddle. A tender word. Honest vulnerability. Genuine appreciation. The smallest act of caring. All count. Every little mosaic has its place in the larger love picture. Best new artist Victoria Monet’s Girls Need Love explores this aspect of not-so-passive female desire “challenging societal expectations and norms around women expressing their needs and wants in relationships.” 

The 2024 feminine energy is all about “letting go anything that doesn’t serve you” by choosing what nourishes you. 

A woman today “knows her worth doesn’t explain or prove why she deserves respect. She simply removes people who don’t give it to her.” 

Learning #5: Alone Time 

And

In the end

All I learned 

Was how

To be strong

Alone

Peace of mind is too precious to be caught in cheap drama it’s said so “she looked at her old life one last time, took a deep breath and gently said to herself, it’s time. I am ready for my new storybook to begin.” 

Alone time is our new buzzword to “recharge, de-stress and re-organize” ourselves. It’s the highest form of self-realignment and balance. Experts contend it also brings about independent thinking, calm introspection, clarity of vision and better problem-solving capability. 

The complexities of a romantic relationship between two deeply connected people that Best R&B Performance ICU by Coco Jones delves into ends up questioning whether such feelings are worth all the pain and turmoil of loss. 

The upshot? Peace also brings with it hope and a firm belief that “some of the best days of your life haven’t even happened yet.” It’s never too late to build new relationships on intimacy, continuity, more satisfaction, smooth transition and deeper meaning.

Echoing the Thoughts and Feelings of author Daniel Chidiac you have realized that “you never really loved them for who they were and a lot was built on…  a projection of what you hoped for,” and so it was best you let them leave. 

Your note to self now reads: Je t’aime comme tu es! Thanx again to the one “for breaking me to the point where I finally learned to value myself!” Worth it I’d say. La Madeline au Truffe anyone?

Views expressed by the author are their own