"Who, being loved, is poor?" ~Oscar Wilde

Today, a good friend of mine sent me a tongue-in-cheek message asking how I was feeling on Valentine's Day. The corners of my mouth curved up at this question. I am a 35 year old single woman surrounded by friends and family getting married and having babies. The world thinks today, this day set apart for the celebration of romance and passion, that I should look around me with a sense of being incomplete and left behind, that as a woman limited by biological time constraints I should feel like an anomally of nature, especially since I have such strong beliefs about intimacy. My response to my friend was a sincere one: I feel great.

Today I had a little old lady, ravaged by time and confined to a wheelchair, tell me I didn't look a day over 25 and that I was beautiful. In fact every time I see this woman who suffers from dementia she shouts from across the senior center,"Hey, Pretty." A kind moment offered to me by this woman I barely know.

But in thinking about my day of singleness, or loser's day as my sister Danielle (who is now married) and I used to jokingly call it, I am actually quite grateful to have an opportunity to reflect and fully understand how I see love and why, to me, Valentine's Day, holds neither pleasure nor pain. When it comes to the celebration of love and affection I see Valentine's Day very much as a lazy person's holiday manipulated by retailers to turn either guilt or perhaps even real loving care into dollars. When I look at certain couples I have been fortunate enough to know, like my friends Brooke and Frankie, I see February 14th as one of 365 Valentine's Days. To see a man and a woman devoted to each other, who laugh and cry together, who support and forgive one another, who write each other notes and poems of affection for no particular reason, is to see that celebrating love is actually best done in the actual loving itself.

This can be said of all the many forms of love that exist out there. As my friend Jane Austen wrote: There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time. And I feel truly blessed in my life to have been the giver as well as recipient of many of these forms: parent-child, sister-brother, sister-sister, Aunt-niece, Aunt-nephiew, friend to friend, divine Father-imperfect child. There is no reason I can fathom for me to be mournful about the one form of love I am currently lacking, because looking at the loves I have and the beauty of the pure loves I have seen through the years, I am quite happy to wait until I can have exactly what I deserve.