relationships and their antidotes

It's been exactly two weeks since Valentine's Day has come and gone and I'm just now realizing it has passed. I was really looking forward to it this year, I planned on cooking a big fancy meal for my boyfriend and me, and sent cards to all my friends and family. However, things got lost in the shuffle of a last minute trip to Los Angeles so that the boy could interview at UCLA's Anderson, and Valentine's Day came and went without much notice. Perhaps that's one of the luxuries of being in a LTR, that one can treat the day and all it's implications with some degree of ambivalence. In one of the notes that I managed to send out, though, I did have to acknowledge that Valentine's Day can be a rather painful occasion, particularly for a dear friend who recently had a nasty and drawn out break-up with her boyfriend of a couple years. I advised this friend to do as I had done in the many years that I was single on Valentine's Day - go out and buy herself a nice piece of jewelry. Women have far better taste in accessories than men, as a rule, and she could treat herself to something fabulous that no boy would ever be able to pick out for her. I got a return letter from her a couple of days ago; it seems she followed my advice and bought herself not one piece of jewelry but a whole jewelrybox full! Brava to that. I shouldn't be surprised, though, this same friend is somewhat of a genius when it comes to jewelry. For the Christmas right before her boyfriend broke up with her in the first of their several splits, he gave her a beautiful infinity symbol necklace from Tiffany's. He (who broke up with her a mere week or two later) said something to the effect of that's how long his love for her would last - infinitely (ah, hindsight). She was touched at the time, however, and truly loved the present and the boy. Fast forward a few weeks, after the nasty split had happened and she was stuck wearing this beautiful but awful symbol of their relationship around her neck. She marched right into the nearest Tiffany's, explained the situation, and walked out with a lovely silver starfish necklace. Things were patched over with the boy in due time, though and all was again quiet on the western front, except that he noticed that she was wearing a different necklace. He asked her what had happened to the present that he had gotten for her. Her ballsy reply? "Because I learned that I am like this starfish, you can cut off a piece of me and I will grow back. You cut out my heart and I got over it." The relationship did not last much longer.