Remembering love

What else to write about other than Valentine’s Day for this Feb. 14 column? It is a providential surprise to remember and reflect on the core and essence of all creation: love. Yep, it is that time of the year when we remember and celebrate love in a unique fashion. I hope and pray that my column will not be received as rain on a parade, a cheap shot at the concept and, most importantly, it wont sour any one’s joy over Valentine’s Day. Rather, it should be received as a sincere, critical reflection over what Valentine’s Day has become for so many of us around the world.

I am not against the concept of Valentine’s Day celebrations by any stretch of imagination. My family and I celebrate Valentine’s Day on Feb.14 in our own way. Here are this year’s Valentine’s Day plans for the Antepli family: my daughter Zainab, who is 10 years old chose our neighbor’s adorable dog Grayle, our cat Princess and me as her valentines. I picked my wife (this has never changed, nor has it been allowed to change, over the years), my son picked, despite so many offers from others including several female Duke students, both of his grandparents who are visiting us from Turkey. We will be writing cards, which we bought several months ago. We will express our intense love to each other; we will remember the stories of love in our lives in the last 12 months. We never buy presents or flowers as we are very reluctant to buy into what Valentine’s Day has become, both in theory and in practice.

My main problem with what Valentine’s Day has become is its meaning to many of us. As we, regretfully and with increasing speed, over-refine our food and the information that we receive … we turn our food and information into quick pills to swallow and quickly forget. I fear that we do the same to very complex and deep concepts such as love. Humanity seems to live with a dangerous delusion that we can measure, quantify, prove and frame everything—including love. We seem to deceive ourselves that whether physical or metaphysical, everything needs to be proved, given a singular definition and a monolithic packaging with clearly defined borders. How can there be only one definition of love? How is it possible to have one way of celebrating and showing love? As John Lennon sings, how is it conceivable that the very fact of love is less important than, who you love, how you love and what you do about it?

Using the most popular definition, what the Antepli family does on every Feb. 14 is anything but a Valentine’s Day celebration because we do not celebrate the kind of love elevated, confined and limited to Disney-style romance between unrealistically good looking boys and girls. Is this is the only kind of love that we should remember and celebrate every year? Isn’t God love and didn’t God’s create everything out of love? Doesn’t a shallow understanding of love and its fake ceremonial manifestations contradict this essence of love?

Secondly, if we confine the concept of love to an idealized romance between a man and women and canonize it like that, do we realize how much we hurt people who, for various reasons, cannot convert and practice this artificial religion of love in the way society has defined it? I think the way we do it, fuels the fire for people who struggle with self-image or, for various reasons, do not have a partner or spouse. The externally imposed pressure and fear of spending Valentine’s Day alone is not negligible, especially among younger members of society. Most of these people, who go through these struggles, actually have parents, siblings, relatives, friends and pets in their lives. So they are not actually alone; but somehow the love that a person gives and receives in those relationships does not count. How unfortunate.

Of course the biggest Valentine’s Day elephant in the room is how much it commercializes love. A multi-billion dollar global industry continues to force people, in a very sophisticated way, (as a Turkish proverb says) to eat as many salty peanuts as they can at Valentine’s Day celebrations—so that the peanut vendors can sell water later and make more money. The industry that has grown up around Valentine’s Day tells us that love has a certain day, a certain color, a certain way of expression to particular people in particular manners … etc. I could not disagree more. We should resist this greedy commercial propaganda in order to preserve the numerous and complex layers of love’s meaning and its diverse manifestations.

I don’t know your Valentine’s Day plans but I am looking forward to my family’s Valentine’s Day dinner where the outpouring of love will be shared. Happy Valentine’s Day everybody!

Abdullah Antepli is the Muslim Chaplain and an adjunct faculty of Islamic Studies. His column runs every other Tuesday.