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Why you should love Valentine's Day

BY JULIA ALLISON | SPECIAL TO amNEWYORK

January 23, 2006

I received an email last week which grouched: "The dirty little secret about Valentine's Day is ... EVERYBODY HATES IT."

Um . no they don't. They definitely don't. In fact, everyone LOVES Valentine's day, they just don't like when their Valentine's Day sucks.

An opportunity to theoretically receive diamonds and roses and chocolate and love letters and lingerie and champagne and sex? Oh, the cliché of it all! The consumerism!! The wait. Those gifts are popular because PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE LOVES THEM. It's a rare, rare woman who will be upset if she receives any of the aforementioned. And it's a rare man who will be unhappy with the thought of an evening spent in bed with you and your new lingerie. Are those stereotypes? Hell yes, they are.

With a half dozen officially sucky Valentine's Days under my belt, I'm still in thrall of the unmitigated potential of the occasion. This is perhaps surprising, given that my most memorable February 14ths include being given a regifted copy of All Quiet on the Western Front (um, it's a war novel. What?!?) and years later, after even my backup date had stood me up, eating an entire jar of frosting. Alone.

No matter I'm a perpetual optimist. And that frosting was actually quite good. Just because I haven't had a "perfect" Valentine's day yet doesn't mean it won't happen sometime in the future!!

Still, if I've learned one thing from my impressive streak of not-quite-romantic V-Days, it's that the holiday rarely goes well for procrastinators. That's why I'm giving you singles ample warning 23 days, to be exact to fall madly in love with a tall, dark, handsome (short, blonde, hot?) stranger and, hell, lose 20 pounds while you're at it.

Or, barring that, find the next best thing that guy at the gym, the next-door neighbor, the boss of your ex-boyfriend (ha!!) and flirt like you're on a reality show with a two- week deadline and significant cash prize.

If you've already snagged a living, breathing human boyfriend of your own, don't encourage him to be "creative." Boys don't understand what that means. Encourage him to think of all the romantic clichés and buy into every one of them.

In other words, get off your snarky, I'm-too-hip-to-possibly-visit-Hallmark New Yorker butts and plan something so ridiculously romantic and cheesy, even Nora Ephron would wince.

Because one day a year, there's nothing wrong with enjoying the hackneyed fantasy of it all just the way you enjoy Disney movies and celebrity weddings. Are they real? No. Will they get divorced? Yes. (next up? "Cinderella: The Custody Battle"). But in the meantime, they'll make you cry like a thirteen-year-old girl watching Titanic.