Forgiveness and Stuff

Singles' Awareness Day came and went, like it does each year, yesterday. You may have heard of this so-called "holiday" at one point or another.

Rather than sitting alone in the darkness at home, eating only the chocolate part right out of multiple boxes of Neapolitan ice cream and sobbing uncontrollably while watching Moulin Rouge! for the 27th time, however, I decided to take a different approach to Valentine's Day this year. I didn't plan on it when the day dawned, but my friend Tyler's Facebook status inspired me to look at things with a new point-of-view as I faced the day.

He posted the following:

"This Valentine's day, instead of celebrating romantic love, I'm going to celebrate forgiveness love. My heart has reached critical mass with bitterness and resentment for all those who have wronged me, all the girls who left me to 'find' themselves or weren't entertained enough or who wouldn't give me the time of day, all the guys who ditched me for their other friends or girlfriends or lied to me, and the family members who weren't there when I needed them. This day I will let forgiveness cleanse my heart so that I may start anew and love without the weeds of the past stifling the flowers of the future. Happy Valentine's Day!"

I have such respect for this unflinchingly honest statement. It recognizes that bad things happen but that they don't need to hold us back or to affect how we interact with others in the future. It encompasses so many worthy, rather than wasteful and unproductive, uses of my time that I don't know where to start. The Angry White Loner couldn't have said it better himself.

I've been where he has been, even recently, but I want to be where forgiveness, time, and experience will and can lead me. Just as I need forgiveness for the many things I do wrong, I, of course, need to forgive others.

It's truly an amazing concept. It's almost like I read it in the scriptures once somewhere.

This also doesn't mean that the AWL won't still be bewildered by some of the things the opposite sex does or doesn't do. (And he's sure that the feeling is mutual.) He will still post about these things from time to time, but it will be done in an effort to decompress and to understand what makes them tick. If family members or friends have input or insights that will help him understand things better going forward, they are certainly welcome to give them.

So, Happy (Belated) Valentine's Day, you wonderful old Building and Loan! Happy Valentine's Day, you twitterpated couples who get all gooey and post photos of flowers delivered and of yourselves hugging and squeezing each other and do more than your share of giving the rest of us diabetes! Perhaps most of all, Happy Valentine's Day, future significant other(s)!

Post-Valentine's Apocalypse: Seven Days Later

Valentine's Day was a week ago. Have you recovered yet?

As for me, I'm suprisingly doing well. But Valentine's Day wasn't always that way.

A couple of years ago, I met a girl I in whom I was very interested. We shared many things in common. She was beautiful, cheerful, witty, outgoing, had a good sense of humor, and, further, she even showed up at some of my improv shows to watch me act like an idiot and would then still speak to me afterward!

She even had a first date with me and told me she looked forward to a second and a third. I do not favor texting as a principal means of communication per se, but she and I lived an hour apart, and we frequently communicated by phone and text in between our face-to-face meetings. I remember thinking something along the lines of, "This is either going to turn out great, or it is going to hurt a lot."

It turned out to hurt a lot. In early February, the phone calls and text gradually stopped. I chalked this up to her being busy with work or something akin to it. Finally, after a week with no communication, I wrote her an e-mail - the only way in which I felt I could properly express myself - basically telling her that I enjoyed her company a lot but that I could see a familiar pattern of withdrawal emerging and that she didn't have to go on ignoring me. I hoped beyond hope I was wrong, but you never know, and I try to always give people the benefit of the doubt.


My suspicions, unfortunately, turned out to be correct. According to the response she sent on February 12, she had received my message on the very day that her ex-boyfriend of "more than a year ago" (her words) was getting married to someone else. It had been a hard breakup, she explained, and though she thought she was over it, it turned out that she wasn't, and this was her way of telling me that it was also now over between her and me with those fateful words I have come to hear more than once: "I'm just not looking for a relationship right now."

More than a year ago! For me, that was the worst part of it all. I read that phrase over and over and wanted to scream all the way down to Provo, just so she could hear it, "Get over it then! He's obviously moved on; why shouldn't you? There is someone who wants to be with you right now."

Valentine's Day that year was a terrible time for me. My brother ended up taking the ticket I had intended for her to use and went with me to a benefit concert on Valentine's Eve. While the performers sang about romantic things, and couples in attendance held hands and danced and gazed into each other's eyes longingly and all of that good stuff, I wanted anything else but to be there. What I really wanted to do was to punch a hole in the wall or drop-kick a kitten or anything that would make me feel even the slightest bit better or less bitter about things.

I also let myself sulk about things basically all February long. In time, I found that a break-up had, indeed, left me unable to pursue a healthy relationship with someone else and that I had to get over it and move on with my life.

Sound at all familiar?

Believe it or not, though the AWL may have a reputation of being an angry loner, he is something of a romantic. By that, I don't mean that I am Rudolph Valentino or Brad Pitt or - heaven help us - the equivalent of what Edward "the mopey vampire" Cullen is to teenage girls and 40+-year-old women.

I have more than 4,000 songs in my music library, and among them you will find many cheesy love songs, including every decade from the 1940s to the present. I am also not afraid to admit that I have, on more than one occasion, wept at the conclusion of a romantic story or movie. I still root for the guy to end up with the (right) girl. I even read a lot of poetry in college as part of my English literature minor studies, and among my favorites are the the poets of the Romantic era (early 19th century): Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, etc.

Above all, I believe our Creator has endowed each of us with a want - nay, a need - to love someone and to be loved in return; someone we will choose to be fiercely loyal to and will do anything for and will sacrifice any and all comforts to make happy. I want someone to confide in, to lean on, to cry with, to laugh with - whatever may come. I want to have all of the gooey-ness that the couples at the Valentine's concert had to share with each other. And I want that someone to feel the same way about me

In spite of me being in my 30s, I have not given up hope that it will happen someday - but I have to move on. I have to keep trying and try again. I may meet someone who even makes me feel that "this is either going to turn out great, or it is going to hurt a lot." But that's a chance everyone has to take at one point or another.