Your Bloody Valentine by Scotch It's somehow bitterly poetic that Valentine's Day hits right in the middle of the year's coldest month. Particularly if you're in that frustrating state of being Reluctantly Single. Everyone supposedly knows when they're in love, whether consummated or requited or no, and, as such, love has been celebrated and bemoaned and pored over and cursed at in story and song for centuries of literate culture -- but for some reason no one seems to focus on the even more acute sensation of not being in it. And everyone kind of knows how it feels. It's this yawning, depthless abyss-thing which no one but you can really see, although it feels painfully exposed to the elements. It's a sense you get late at night, from totally out of nowhere, while listening to music or watching TV or reading or lying in bed, a sense which relentlessly pounds in your inner ear and your lower abdomen and makes you violently aware of the passage of time and space around you. It's a dark, creeping, paroxysmal vacuity in the pit of your heart, a void, an absence of something, waiting, wanting to be filled. You're not in love. You don't have love. Love does not have you. And so Valentine's Day's wintry temporal placement seems especially sadistic but appropriate, what with the fact that the day is a separate and specific "holiday" devoted to making those people who are in love feel a little better about themselves and their relationships by giving them all an excuse to shower extra love and affection and flowers and cards and candies and other various tokens upon their significant others (the sort of thing one would kind of ideally expect them to do even without the guise of a Hallmark/Hershey holiday), and all the while essentially pushing libidinal thumbscrews into those legions of the population who are single or unattached (and therefore sullenly and irascibly left in emotional vacuo in the center of the freezing wet February chill) with emphatic reminders that those unlucky legions have: no Valentine. And yet this is a beautiful kind of thing, this misery-inducing clarity that Valentine's Day provides, because by driving home the rift between the haves and have-nots of love, it really outlines in stark black and white the prevailing sentiment of raw frustration that's symptomatic of our times. Not Petrarchan frustration; not entirely. Mainly Cobainian frustration. Vedderian frustration. This stuff is displacing the love stuff; displaced it several years ago, actually, and it's been ripening nicely ever since. Getting bent out of shape over love is kind of passé, or at best it's taken a distant back burner slot -- what's more the cultural speed, none too profoundly, is getting bent out of shape with a) being who you are or b) being despondently unaware of who you are. Basically it's Petrarchan love minus the external love object and focused inward, screaming at yourself about yourself, as though you're both the paramour and the spurned. Probably one of the most spectacular events in the history of love was when Petrarch's beloved but unapproached Laura died -- and the anguished love poetry he wrote about her continued unabated (and actually kind of improved), demonstrating that the existence of an outward recipient of love is somewhat beside the point; that love is pretty much an internalizing process anyway, which may just as well end as begin on the inside. In so doing, he unwittingly set the stage for epochs of boring, tedious, maudlin, self-stroking romantic flagellation, ultimately leading to the somewhat disheartening idea that love doesn't really require two people to be in love with one another as much as it requires that they just be complementally in love with being in love. And the conflicts that give rise to this modern romantic frustration make Petrarch's treacly burn-in-winter-freeze-in-summer paradoxes pale by comparison. Love's a nerve-numbing, libido-locking affair nowadays because there has never been such a wide lacuna between cultural expectations about sexuality and social conditioning against sexuality. On the one hand, you have our modern society which prides itself on being unafraid to speak frankly about sexuality on TV, in movies, and in everyday culture, a freedom which comes from the sexual revolution of the sixties. All these outlets of pop culture assure people that they should be out there gloriously revelling in youthful saturnalia, just like the hot-tubbing beautiful people on TV, just like their Boomer parents did before them, just like everyone else obviously is doing. And yet what's bumping up against those expectations are the equally vehement warnings against sexuality that have been emanating from other media outlets since the mid-eighties -- paralyzing threats of sexual assault, sexual harassment, unwanted pregnancy, AIDS (and the rest of the STD/STI pantheon), the taboo of masturbation, the abstinent behavior dictated by the resurgence of conservative values, etc. Plus the pressure to exceed the career success of your parents, the hypochondriacal reliance on Rx and/or therapy for any kind of emotional neediness or volatility, and the overwhelming sense of arm's-length irony and cynicism which pervades every scintilla of popular and social culture -- and it's hardly a wonder that this young generation is romantically paranoid in the worst of ways. It's a mess. A ludicrous, anserine, tragic mess of contradictions. It's telling that so many modern divorces are chalked up to that delightful little legal bromide which has spread malignantly through the vernacular: irreconciliable differences. But! That's all hardly grounds for jettisoning the floor of your emotional equilibrium. Expunge from your mind the idea, however timeless yet timely it may seem, that love cannot be explained. Of course it can be explained; moreover, it can be dissected, analyzed, predicted, and made to leap through fiery hoops at the ring of a Pavlovian bell. Love is really nothing more than a messy amalgamation of self-loathing, fear, guilt, loneliness, hunger, and pity, aimed in the right direction and combined in the proper proportions. Of course, figuring out that direction and those proper proportions is the real nut to crack, but it's not really a precision thing anyway. Love in the time of the fin de siècle (and in fact we're now at the point where we're so fin de siècle that we're practically debut de siècle, to say nothing of fin de millénaire) may be complex and aberrant, but that should hardly be confused with practical opacity. See, the great thing about the emotional deadlocking and romantic obstacles is that love has become almost criminally easy to figure out. Once you know how to take advantage of all the frustration pressure points, falling in love is merely a matter of knowing how to stick out the proverbial tripping foot. In that vein, here are five imperative ideas, sensitively omnisex, to remember in your search for love. 1. Solitude is an aphrodisiac. It's the damndest thing: people are undeniably attracted to lonely people. Which, when you think about it, is incredibly propitious and cool, what with the overwhelming amount of loneliness that an increasingly alienated culture has been fostering for the past decade or so. Maybe it's the timelessly stirring image of the steppenwolf, the brooding outsider rejecting the opioid norms of society, kept prisoner by the secluded tower of his own introversion, etc., etc.; whatever it is, it's intensely sexy. Or maybe it's just the utter disgust with the nearly equal resurgence in the homogenizing pack mentality (too often a vain and empty refuge for the modern lonely) which is the inescapable yang to the yin of solitude, elevating that forlorn estrangement to epic scales of sexiness by comparison. It's a bit foggy as to which direction the causality goes in this one, seeing as how loneliness appears to be both the cause and effect of its own seductiveness -- but it's not really worth debating. It works, and the questions are best left unasked. 2. Transcend your gender. Update yourself and breathe a well-deserved sigh of relief: gender is irrelevant. Sexual preferences have been reduced to little more than a matter of aesthetics -- preferring the person with the muscles and short hair or the one with curves and long hair -- which have become hopelessly outdated and ambiguous now that a) the elements of male and female attractiveness have completely converged, and b) the number of people who are sick of living up to their respective gender standards are so astoundingly numerous that it's just become pointless to even bother. As for behavior, the old familiar archetypes of male and female are at this point so outmoded that they may as well just not exist, and even when they do rear their unpleasant-looking heads, say, in the form of the Manly Guy and Girly Chick, no one takes them seriously; and in fact it's more often than not the subject of hasty apology on the part of those very archetypal transgressors once they realize their grievous faux pas. Gender-related communication between men and women is still a travesty, but this seems beside the point when you consider that communication between pretty much everyone is an equally egregious travesty, so there's really no basis for falling into associative fallacy and pinning the problems on gender. Too many hangups. You need to see gender (and all the archaic members of its sociocultural entourage) as a dusty relic of an older, more ignorant age; something to be lifted like a veil, something to be simplified and passed off as moot. Much of the L/G/B/T community has been reaping the fruits of this outlook for years, so to speak, and it's that kind of delimiting process which ends up flowing really well with modern attempts at love-seeking. Definitely in your favor, regardless of your swinging direction. At this point the only hanging-on points separating "male" from "female" (barring the obvious biological stuff, which admittedly may very well be a deciding factor for you if that's how you are) are the hackneyed ideas of chauvinist sexism and feminist political correctness, both of which are essentially last-gasp cries for help from those sad people of both sexes who are still scrabbling to hang onto their rapidly-obsolescing gender-based identities. They're on their way out. They're lemmings. If the wind is right, you can still smell the stale Speed Stick and the blotted Estée. 3. Smoke. No matter how ruthlessly the government may slap the tobacco companies around, the one thing that they'll never be able to take away from the cigarette industry is the simple fact that smoking looks fucking cool. It's not just the poised, suave demeanor involved with the actual smoking of the cigarette, although that goes a long way; but what is truly attractive about smoking is the implicit hastening of death that you're flaunting. In the sobering face of an ever-increasing life expectancy which the human body clearly wasn't engineered to handle, and in light of the painful, ultimately futile life that awaits you, it's just a brilliant idea to shorten your life at the same time you're relieving the stress contained therein. So you're the ultimate symbol of sexy self-negation, abusing your body for short-term chemical stimulation using the primal fire that is at once tamed at your fingertips and an instrument of your own slow carcinogenic self-destruction. Irresistible. 4. Sex. Self-explanatory. 5. Get thee wedded. And do it while young. College is a great place to start: there are so many people insidiously trolling for future spouses that you're likely to get foul-hooked by a would-be-soulmate on the first attempt. Most young single people still tend to take the Escargot Theory of marriage, which basically holds that even though many people consider it a matchless delicacy, there's still something elementally nasty about it: when you think about escargot too closely, you stop thinking about the urbane gourmet aspect and start to realize that you are in fact eating slugs, and you can almost imagine the sensation of their eyestalks tickling your esophagus on the way down. Don't think like that. You have to swallow the slug without thinking. And eventually you'll come around and convince yourself that those slugs really are the epicurean luxuries that everyone else says they are. Marriage is also a great way to overcome the ubiquitous twentysomething search for identity, since you'll end up defining yourself entirely in terms of your mate, and vice versa; this way, you can at least have a paltry glimmer of a sense of self instead of none at all. The world beats down uniqueness and independence anyway, and, as far as consolation prizes go, you could definitely do worse. After all, to grossly conflate Saint Paul and Neil Young, it is better to marry than to fade away. So the imminent approach of that pinkest of days undoubtedly heralds meadows of long-stemmed roses, warehouses of fatty assorted boxed chocolates, and vast oceans of amorous nutrasugary couples gleefully dancing in the world's aisles. But do not despair, not excessively. Love waits for you. An elusive, shadowy bastard while you hunt it. But you shall triumph, you and your tungsten-razor-sharp thirst for holistically-fulfilling companionship and unconditional rapture, even as Valentine's Day unassumingly blips by into another dull year. You will prevail, in spite of your own pathetic self. The stats are on your side. The mercurial spirit of the fin de millénaire will play right into your hands. And you will not be alone much longer -- at least not in the same way.

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