These are not love songs

Valentine’s Day is just a day; a neutral day, neither good nor bad. It can pass by unacknowledged every year if we choose. Dwelling on it, hating it, railing against it, that’s also a choice.

Not everyone can make that choice . For some of us the day is a reminder of past trauma. There is an ebb and flow of true pain associated with this holiday that some years barely grazes our consciousness and others runs over us like a fucking train.

Today is February 13th, 2021 and marks the 28th anniversary of my wedding. I was 18 when I got married to a polygamist man twice my age. I was his second wife, his first (and current) wife was the same age as him, his childhood sweetheart. I spent the next eight months being emotionally abused by them and have endured a lifetime of trauma as a result.

I remember that Valentine’s Day, nearly three decades ago. I had spent my wedding night alone; it would be months before I ever spent a night with my husband. I had married him, but I wasn’t really his wife. And on that Valentine’s Day it was his wife who he took to dinner to celebrate their love.

In the years that followed, Valentine’s Day and the days surrounding it stirred up so much emotion that I could barely breathe. I had taken to cutting myself soon after the marriage ended, and it was a practice I engaged in for about a decade. Every year around Valentine’s Day a new cut would appear on my wrist. Never deep, just a superficial cut, but always a fresh wound that would eventually disappear into the forest of scars crisscrossing my wrists; scars that could never be associated with a specific day, but with a decade of all-consuming untreated mental disorder.

‘Tomorrow Wendy’ by Concrete Blonde is not a love song. Despite it’s chorus of “Hey, hey goodbye, tomorrow Wendy’s going to die” it’s also not applicable to the pain I was feeling. Johnette Napolitano even told me in a concert that it’s about a suicidal prostitute with AIDS. I was none of those things. I was self-destructive but not suicidal and the rest certainly didn’t apply. But when living feels like dying having a song with a chorus with your name in it about dying tomorrow resonates just a little too much. Thus, it was the anthem to my self-mutilation; cut after cut made to the sultry sounds of Johnette’s voice and the sacrilegious lyrics that wouldn’t truly resonate with me for decades.

That failed marriage didn’t exactly set me up for success in relationships going forward. Years of drifting in and out of unhealthy, often abusive relationships left me a liiiittle jaded when it came to love and romance. ‘Love Stinks’ by the J. Geils Band was a good go to for putting on a façade of romantic disdain for all the world to see. It’s a fun, peppy song about how relationships generally suck, and we should all stay out of them, but also have a sense of humor about it.

It was my public face. The “I’m a strong independent woman, I don’t need no man” face I showed the world. But that wasn’t real. What was real was me eternally trying to find the love that was denied to me at 18, when I entered that loveless and unbearably painful marriage. I was forever searching for my prince in a string of narcissists who barely liked women and certainly didn’t like complicated women, much like my asshole ex-husband.

In private ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division fucking resonated with me. The low monotone, the time-elongating tempo, the biographical/prophetic lyrics all stood as a monument to my love life and the utter futility of it all.

It is not without a little embarrassment that I write of that teenage angst brought to life in my 20s and 30s. I mean, c’mon, what fucking adult listens to Ian Curtis’s somber tones and thinks that depressed Brit really speaks to me?

Even worse, among all the failed relationships were the handful of unrequited ones. The men who were kind to me, which I always foolishly mistook for love. In my defense it’s really fucking hard to know the difference when my first experience with love was me desperately devouring the morsels of kindness my husband fed me between the chastising and berating. Those fleeting moments were the only sign that he might possibly love me (he didn’t) and later in life, with other men, I responded the same way. “Oh, he was nice to me, he must love me .” (He didn’t)

That is not to say that I was entirely delusional in those instances. Without exception those men knew how I felt, knew the depths of my affection, knew what they were doing to me. And without exception they fostered it for the ego stroke.

The Buzzcocks are my anthem to unrequited love. ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?)’ has been playing in my head all week as I ended one of these pointless exercises in humiliation. He knows I love him and still flirted with me. He even dropped cute little hints that if he ever mustered the courage to end his unhappy marriage maybe we could have a go. Man, did I love that beautiful, tall unworthy man! Still do. Can’t fucking help myself.

It would be very easy to devolve into ‘All by Myself’ by Eric Carmen or try to rally with ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor. But those aren’t who I am. Who I am is someone who discovered a long time ago that the only band that can bring me out of a funk and cheer me right up is Clutch and one song is always sure to get my foot tapping and my happy heart beating, and that’s ‘Tight Like That.’ Put that shit on at full volume and drive around on a beautiful Spring day with the windows open (or the top down if you’re lucky) and I dare you not to be instantly cheered.

Lest you worry that all of this is just a confession of untreated mental illness, fear not, I am in treatment. Have been for years. In fact, in the last few years, I was finally diagnosed with PTSD, which has given me a road map for healing (or several roadmaps, thank you modern psychiatry.) I decided many years ago that I am not meant for this lifetime of heartache. Maybe I am not meant for love either. It’s possible that’s true. I think some of just aren’t. But I’m really not meant to drift in and out of heartache as I experience unhealthy relationships or to wallow in the self-pity of my unending string of failed attempts to find love.

What I am meant for is a lifetime of happiness denied me by cruel men with their dehumanizing agendas. I am not meant for the darkness. I am meant to live in the light. That’s why at the end of it all, no matter the fairy tale beginning, rocky road, or tumultuous ending I always find my way to Polyphonic Spree. There is no more joyful anthem than ‘Light and Day/Reach for the Sun.’ I am not the conglomerate of angst, sorrow, and pain of all those other songs. I am the pure radiating joy that ‘Light and Day’ represents.

I just have to be reminded of it occasionally.