The Lonely Person's (Gory) Guide to Valentine's Day

It's that time of the year again. The grocery stores are full of pink hearts, and advertisements everywhere are dominated by dewy-eyed couples and candlelight.

Ugh.

Don't get me wrong: I love love. Love is one of the great themes of human existence. It recurs in my fiction stories again and again. But like a lot of people, I've had a hard few years here on planet covid, and that's made meeting new people difficult. Relationships that once seemed solid are increasingly shaky, and if you sign up for Tinder and arrange a coffee date, you have to do the mental calculus to decide if the coffee date is worth the risk of catching the plague. Meet-cutes are improbable with everyone trying to endure the storm, and you're not exactly going to notice someone's gorgeous smile if they're properly wearing their mask.

So yeah, this is going to be a particularly hard romance-season for me since there really isn't much romance left.

Do you want to curl up in a blanket with your partner, possibly sipping a good wine, and chuckle your way through a romcom as part of an elaborate human mating ritual? You do?

Then move on. You're not invited to the lonely person's club this year.

However, if you're in a bit of a lonely mood, and you want to have a bloody good time this Valentine's Day, you've come to the right place.

Order yourself some snacks, or make yourself a good dinner. If you want to crack open that bottle of wine, go for it. You've earned it. Just make sure that your phone is safely stored elsewhere before you drunkenly text your ex because you're sure that they're the one for you, and you miss them with every breath you take and the thought of living life without them makes you write sad poetry and listen to sappy music. Okay? No one wants a sloppy Valentine's Day text from their ex, and no relationship has been resuscitated through the sheer power of unidirectional desperation.

You have to figure some of that out for yourself. What will make you feel special? I can't tell you what to do, but I can give you license to do it. Go, my pupils, and treat yourself like your own special person. And when the sky goes dark, instead of lighting some candles, here's some other entertainment options for you:

The Shining

Movie? Book? Your call.

You probably already know this, but on the off chance that you're unfamiliar with this classic work of modern horror, The Shining follows Jack and Wendy Torrance as they try their hand at a real lockdown. Social distancing, you might call it. They are settling in for an extended quarantine of sorts, and like so many couples they're going to discover if that brings them together or drives them apart.

Just like many of the lonely folks of the modern era, Jack and Wendy start to get on each other's nerves. Bad habits start to grate on each other, all of that stuff. And if you're feeling bad for yourself because your ex won't speak to you anymore after a series of arguments that you only half remember because it feels like the lockdown has turned your brain into mush and every day blends into each other under the gray sky of this endless horror...

At least you can look at Wendy Torrance's situation and remember that there are some things worse than loneliness.

As well, The Shining prompts us all to check in on ourselves. How many of us have poured ourselves into new projects over the past year? Jack tried that, but all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Food for thought there! As well, during these dark months, its easy to let the charming ghost at the bar trick you into drinking more than you want to, so maybe consider corking up that wine after all.

Just remember: sober or not, do not text your ex.

Ready or Not

If the frozen mountains of Colorado hit a little bit too close to home right now, that's totally understandable. Maybe you'd rather fantasise about marrying into an opulent lifestyle. Here you are, a lonely commoner, and then a rich heir sweeps in to woo you.

Only that sort of stuff only happens in movies, and now we're all enviously scrolling through Instagram while eyeing that wine bottle again.

Ready or Not is one of the great horror comedies of recent years, and it is the perfect antidote to Instagram envy. Grace (Samara Weaving) is the lowly commoner in question, and the movie begins with Grace marrying the charming young Alex Le Domas, heir to the Le Domas gaming empire. But the Le Domas family has a secret: whenever someone new joins the family, they have to play a game. Most of the time this is fine (even a little dull), but there's always the chance that they'll be assigned hide and seek, and that's when things get messy.

Wouldn't you know it? Grace drew hide and seek. So she goes off to hide, unaware of just how dire things will get if the family finds her. It will be a miracle if she survives until dawn.

Ready or Not serves as a thoughtful reminder of the fact that the lifestyle of the most enviable members of our society are actually in service of demonic cults powered by human sacrifice. If that wedding on Instagram looked too good to be true, it probably was. The poor bride probably spent her wedding night fighting off her in-laws with a shotgun.

If that's not a sentiment that all of us lonely people need this Valentine's season, I don't know what is.

Pet Sematary

Returning to the land of Stephen King, have you ever considered that sometimes dead is better? Of course, in Pet Sematary the "dead" refers to humans. In specific, it refers to the family of Louis Creed, who come back from the dead with unfortunate consequences.

However, have you considered that perhaps it fits your love-life as well? So put away your cell-phone and stop trying to revive your dead relationship, because if it does come back it will be a horrible zombie-creature hellbent on destroying you.

Or maybe you've tried to convince yourself that sometimes dead is better applies to your love-life, and that makes you feel hollow inside, and this isn't actually helpful, so why don't we move on quickly?

A Good Marriage

Still in King country here. In A Good Marriage, a wife finds out that her husband is a serial killer. That's a pretty big bummer, and it's much sadder than still being alone. Right?

Still not helpful?

What about...

The Thing on the Doorstep

Rewinding about a century, we've got H.P. Lovecraft who crafted a love story about Edward Derby and Asenath Waite. Only there's occult magic involved, so Asenath Waite might actually be possessed by the soul of her father, and that's not the end of the bizarre happenings here.

Why is it that horror works so well when it's entangled with love?

Because love makes us vulnerable. Love involves lowering our defences. Love involves inviting someone into our lives, and entangling ourselves in their lives. Intimacy and vulnerability are practically synonyms, and true romance involves letting another person in beyond the point where we keep other people shut out.

We spend all of our lives building up our defences. We start small and defenceless, but over time we learn not to fully trust anyone. At some point we drift away from intimacy with our parents. Maybe they disappoint us, or maybe we disappoint them, or maybe our lives are just on different paths. But for whatever reason, a gap appears.

Around our friends, we cultivate a particular image of ourselves. We tell stories that show ourselves in ways we like. We keep our bank accounts secret, and we only post on social media when its something we really want to share.

Then someday someone walks into our lives. They charm us. We want to spend all of our time with them. We realise that to truly fuse ourselves to them, we can't just be the cultivated image. We have to let them see us for who we really are. We peel off the layers that we hide beneath, literally and metaphorically, and we look at them and say, "Do you still want to be with this?"

But it doesn't always last forever.

And because you let your guard down, when they're gone it hurts so much more. You lost this person, and you lost the future you imagined with them, and you can only imagine that things will be okay again if you grab your phone and text them, u up? at 2 AM on February 15th with half a bottle of cabernet sauvignon sloshing around in your belly.

That sucks.

But wouldn't it be so much worse if it turned out that the woman you married might be possessed by the soul of an ancient wizard?

Scream

I've already written a lot about Scream on Vocal, so I won't spend too long on the details here:

The overarching theme of Scream is that everyone and anyone could secretly be plotting a spree of murders, and the people closest to you are most likely the killer.

In that light, loneliness is practically a superpower! Romance is kryptonite, so let's keep it far, far away.

In Conclusion

In all seriousness, this is going to be a really hard season for a lot of us, and as much fun as all of these entertainment options are, none of them are going to magically fix that. As much as I joke about cracking open a bottle of wine, I know that personally I won't be doing that. Sometime last year I had to stop drinking, because it became clear to me that I was just using that a coping mechanism.

I don't have a magic solution for you, and no one does. If you are alone right now, and you don't want to be alone, that's going to be hard. After a few hard years, this will be a particularly hard season. There's no way around that.

If you're feeling crummy right now, that's okay. I am too. We're alone, but we're not uniquely cursed or anything like that. It's just a hard time to be a person, and if you feel like crap, that's okay. Lots of us feel like crap. You're not broken or flawed for feeling that way.

Hopefully next year I can write, "The Sappy Guide for Your First Valentine's Day with a New Partner," and hopefully all of you lonely people will be able to take pleasure in reading it.

Until then, at least we have horror.

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