Over 20 years ago, I covered my face with my hands and shyly told my (now) husband, “I’m moving away for graduate school and I’d love you to go with me, but I want us to be married first.” After he agreed that it seemed like a great idea, we shopped together for an engagement ring before he chose one of the two I had liked best. He offered it to me from one knee a couple of months later in a “surprise” engagement. As a wife, I tell others he proposed. But as a social scientist who studies marriages and engagements, I’m not so sure.

Young, heterosexual adults increasingly prefer egalitarian relationships in which both partners work for pay and contribute equitably to childcare and domestic labor—even as they struggle to realize this balance. Equalizing the proposal—a single moment in time rather than an ever-changing, lifetime negotiation of labor—should be much easier. Still, the proposal process remains overwhelmingly a male responsibility—and privilege. The stubbornness of this seemingly last acceptable bastion of male control has a lot to tell us about gender, relationships, and the division of labor in 21st-century America.

Sociologist Sharon Sassler and I interviewed a number of cohabiting couples between the ages of 18 and 34 who were considering or in the process of discussing marriage with their partners. We explicitly asked them which partner should propose. We received a fair number of responses such as “Whomever wants,” especially from college-educated men and women. But when we changed the question slightly to “Who do YOU want to propose if the two of you get married?”, the response was overwhelmingly the male partner. And this remained true even among those who otherwise viewed their relationships as equal.

When we asked why, men and women alike expressed concerns that “flopping the question” would call into question long-established gender roles. “It’s just a manly job,” explained Terrell.* “It’s just natural.”

Nathan, who was committed to sharing the housework and financial responsibilities equally with his partner, Andrea, had just proposed. Although Andrea had been the one to initiate their move-in, he said of the wedding proposal: “I think it’s the guys’ job, not to be chauvinistic and old-fashioned. But I think I would have felt kind of like a putz if she would have proposed to me.”

Many women felt the same way. Tara told us, “I said, ‘If you don’t do it by a certain time, I’m just going to do it.’ But I don’t mean that, because I don’t want to do it ’cause then I’ll feel like masculine, and I don’t want to feel masculine.” Asked to elaborate, Tara said, “I’ve definitely been the initiator in some of our other circumstances that are traditionally I think male roles. This is just a big one. And because everyone will ask, ‘How did it happen?’ And I don’t want to say, ‘Well I did it.’ I can’t. It would kill me I think.”

Female proposals were not entirely out of the question. Dawn had planned to propose to Eric, only to be dissuaded by both her mother and Eric’s wishes. She said, “I’ve threatened to propose to him a few times. He’s like, ‘No, the man does it.’ I think he would feel unmanly if he didn’t do it. Yeah, I know that sounds weird from a guy that’s really liberal, but I just feel like he wants to—he wants control of the situation.”

Eric’s explanation was simpler: “I just see it as the guy should propose—the classic way.”

All of this, for one simple question. But the power to propose is not merely picking out the right place or time to ask those four little words. It’s the ability to determine the pace of the entire relationship. It stands to reason that if the male partner is the only one who can move the couples’ union into marriage, the female partner has only two choices: wait to be asked or leave. In this way, the man’s timeline determines the seriousness of the relationship, with couples often scarcely realizing just how much control that affords him. In fact, this kind of “hidden power,” which makes certain gender roles seem natural or inevitable, can continually and insidiously reinforce patriarchal norms without ever really being questioned.

So what’s a modern straight couple to do? What might a more equal proposal look like?

Well, for one, heterosexual cis couples could certainly look to their gay and lesbian counterparts. They often leave the power of the proposal to a decision reached through discussion before the partner who most wants to advance the relationship or who prefers to stand on ceremony is the one to propose. However, such a change requires overcoming centuries of tradition and internalized sexism.

More recently, “dual proposals” have begun to make the rounds on social media. In this model, each partner proposes, and each (hopefully!) accepts. Though, of course, this is not without its own challenges: Need the proposals occur on the same day? Who goes first? And is the engagement official after the first “Yes”?

As the age of marriage has risen over time in the U.S. to just over 30 for men and 28 for women and the institution has become more economically elite, a third possibility for the “new proposal” seems apparent. Far from being the blushing bride and fresh-faced groom leaving the family home, today’s betrothed couples typically already have established their own households—most often living together and perhaps even with children of their own. The pomp and circumstance of the engagement period that were designed to help provide a young couple with the goods necessary for setting up a new household, like hope chests, engagement parties, and bridal showers, are no longer a major factor. Now, marriage is a pinnacle marker of adulthood rather than its beginning. After discussing whether they wish to marry, couples could simply decide that they are engaged, no proposal needed. In fact, rather than spending money renting out the jumbotron or hiring the skywriter, they might choose to host a party announcing their engagement and celebrating all who have supported them along the way.

Human beings have agency—and with that, the power to choose to modify or reject social norms. If our society continues to promote the proposal as a nearly unquestionable male right, we will continue to go through great lengths to reach true egalitarianism. Regardless of when our engagement became “official,” in the end, my husband and I are no less married. We have crafted a life full of mutual admiration, equal sharing, and a whole lot of fun. The question will be, is the conventional start to that life together—a male proposal—a tradition that heterosexual couples want to eschew?

Saying “yes” to an overhaul of the marriage proposal might be beneficial not only to our own relationships, but for generations to come.

The post Who Should Put a Ring on It? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s a question that feels especially appropriate on Valentine’s Day, the holiday most linked to the lonely-hearted.

Over two decades since Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone sounded the alarm bell on social isolation, and almost three years since COVID lockdowns began, we regularly speak about an epidemic of loneliness in the U.S.

But for all its ubiquity, loneliness remains relatively taboo. As psychiatrists Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz observed in 2010’s The Lonely American, this nation, especially—and its obsession with self-reliance—has created a culture of shame around what is an “ordinary human emotion.” So much so that they noted most of their patients “were more comfortable saying they were depressed than saying they were lonely.”

But what if we considered the other side of the loneliness coin?

“I’m quite fascinated by loneliness. It can be really beautiful when you turn it over,” the Canadian singer and songwriter Carly Rae Jepsen muses in the introduction to her latest album, The Loneliest Time, which samples different flavors of loneliness—from the breezy brutality of “Beach House” (a bop about trying to find a connection on dating apps, the hook goes: “I’ve got a beach house in Malibu, and I’m probably going to hurt your feelings”) to the lead single, “Western Wind,” which Jepsen wrote after losing her grandmother.

The album, born out of the global pandemic, was what first got me thinking about how narrow our cultural framing around the subject remains.

But that’s slowly changing. The Loneliest Time is part of an emerging body of art and scholarship that could help us imagine a wider story around loneliness in the U.S. and around the world.

Until recently, the origins of loneliness were not a major topic of inquiry. “The history of loneliness is fundamental to understanding its prevalence and meanings in the 21st century. And yet this history has been virtually neglected,” noted sociocultural historian Fay Bound Alberti in her 2019 work, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion.

Bound Alberti dates the thing we call “loneliness” today back relatively recently, to the 1800s when the term “loneliness” shifted in use from referring to physical distance—like how far you lived from town—to the emotional state associated with a perceived lack of company.

This change in meaning was not just a linguistic quirk. Modern loneliness, Bound Alberti argues, could only arise within a certain set of conditions—its invention dependent on “the formation of a society that was less inclusive and communal and more grounded in the scientific, medicalized idea of an individual mind, set against the rest.” It was the “philosophical and spiritual framework” of the industrializing world, then, which allowed for the condition of loneliness to take off.

That being said, as Amherst College’s Amelia Worsley writes in the forthcoming Routledge History of Loneliness, while loneliness “could not have always signified what it does today” the “complexity of early references to loneliness” is also understudied. The more we learn about it, the more some scholars of earlier periods are starting to argue that throughout history “there has always been something like the experience that is today called loneliness.”

The Routledge History of Loneliness includes research from scholars like Hannah Yip and Thomas Clifton, experts in Renaissance-era British literature who recently held a digital conference exploring early modern loneliness. The online meeting examined how historical subjects’ views on the subject compare to our own today. Just like now, Yip and Clifton concluded after the panels wrapped, loneliness was “a symptom of a system which at times alienates, isolates, or side-lines individuals.” And just like now, the balms for it were “compassion and community,” they wrote, quoting the 17th-century poet and priest George Herbert’s poem “Denial”: “They and my minde may chime / And mend my ryme.”

Afer reading that, I thought about how Jepsen said something similar when promoting The Loneliest Time. Author and critic Hanif Abdurraqib had noted on his podcast that listening to the album “there wasn’t any shame around loneliness or the idea of loneliness or the realities of loneliness, but it also wasn’t some finger-waggy thing—‘You just got to be good at living alone.’”

“I don’t think loneliness, the cure for it, is being really good at being alone,” Jepsen agreed. Instead she found that experiencing loneliness was what pushed her to seek out connection. “Reaching for that is what I wanted from this album,” she said. “I think that’s why it has a hopeful spin on it. It’s not ‘Be OK on your own.’ It’s natural to want to reach for people; we should. That’s what life is about. So let your loneliness make you brave.”

The more we understand the history of loneliness, the more we can start to see loneliness as a force like any other—one that, if we let it, can push us toward introspection and action and community. Just like 500 years ago, when the balladeers sang about being alone, today in an even lonelier time, works like The Loneliest Time should be taken as an invitation: to embrace this tangle of emotions and let it help connect us to the larger human experience.

The post ‘Let Your Loneliness Make You Brave’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The saga, which involved effusive wooing, a curated Spotify playlist, and of course, the cold exit (not to mention at least one allegation of an unsolicited explicit pic), proved to be just the kind of catnip that can scorch-earth its way through social media.

By the time #WestElmCaleb—so named for the place of work listed on his dating profile— played out on TikTok, no one came out unscathed. The original West Elm Caleb’s identity was repeatedly doxxed. Localized efforts to name and shame the West Elm Calebs of other zip codes took off. And brands, from Ruggable to Matel, jumped into the fray like vultures to a carcass to pick at what was left.

Dubbed “2022’s most embarrassing witch hunt,” the level of engagement around West Elm Caleb was perhaps its most puzzling dimension. Did everyone just hear about dating in the year 2022?

But from Caleb’s original sin, love bombing—one person showering another with grand romantic gestures just out of the gate in order to manipulate them—to the TikTok mob that emerged, narcissism offers a through line. As a well-timed New York Times explainer noted, the phenomenon of love bombing is a red flag that you’re dating a narcissist. (And if you’re gleefully filming front-facing videos in full makeup as part of a vicious pile on, that’s maybe also an indicator.)

Studies have shown that less than 5.3 percent of the general population actually has narcissistic personality disorder—which itself continues to be a controversial diagnosis. At one point, the American Psychiatric Association considered dropping it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders entirely. Yet the term “narcissism” continues to be a buzzword of our times.

Coronated into popular culture in the 1970s by social critics like Christopher Lasch, who latched onto it as a sign of national decay, narcissism has captured the American imagination like no other over the last half century. The word has continued to be melted down and repurposed into a catch-all insult about self-absorption and vanity. In our social media age, that often takes the form of a hand-wavey article every few months or so proclaiming that this latest generation is the most narcissistic yet (not true), or that the internet has made narcissists of us all (well, maybe).

Narcissism, of course, dates back all the way to its foundational myth, famously immortalized by the Roman poet Ovid. Ovid spun the tale of a handsome young hunter, Narcissus, who is prophesized to live a long life, so long as he never recognizes himself. When Narcissus spurns the affections of a nymph named Echo, she becomes overcome by grief, fading away until just her voice is left. Watching this, Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, decides to punish Narcissus and lures him to a pool where he fatefully peers upon his reflection for the first time. Transfixed by his beauty, Narcissus falls in love with his own self-image. Ovid’s version, published in Metamorphoses in 8 CE, ends in heartbreak: Narcissus realizes he can never be with his own reflection and like Echo, he too withers away, ultimately transforming into the Narcissus flower.

But that narrative isn’t the earliest known telling of the myth. Only a few years ago, that version—a darker story that ends in suicide—was found in the Oxyrhynchus papyri trove, the largest collection of ancient writings in the world, so named for the location in Egypt where they were discovered a little over 100 years ago.

Oxford classicist Benjamin Henry, who transcribed and translated the fragment, believes it was written down in the mid-1st century BCE by Parthenius of Nicaea, who was known for recording obscure stories of love. Parthenius’s Narcissus doesn’t involve Echo, but rather male suitors, whose affections Narcissus also spurns in favor of his own reflection.

The myth wasn’t intended as a cautionary tale around vanity. Rather the narrative, which likely originated in the Hellenistic age, as early as the 3rd century BCE, was probably used to explain why a particular god was worshiped in a particular place—in this case to encourage the local population to honor Vera, the god of love, more reverently. “Whether it was supposed to shed any light on psychology or any such thing is rather unclear,” Henry told me.

Had Ovid not revamped the tale, Narcissus may have ended up just an obscure local story. “It’s really Ovid’s retelling and ingenious rhetorical speeches that he gives to Narcissus and Echo that made the myth popular,” Henry explained.

It’s worth remembering that there are actually several early versions of the Narcissus story out there. Another version, by an unknown author, even creates a backstory where Narcissus is in love with a sister, who dies at a young age. In this telling, Narcissus consoles himself with his watery visage, which resembles hers—casting his self-absorption in a more sympathetic light.

This more nuanced interpretation of Narcissus is more in keeping with the way the psychological condition was first characterized by Freud in his influential 1914 paper “On Narcissism.” Freud borrowed the term from Havelock Ellis, the founder of modern sexology (and a eugenicist) and German psychiatrist Paul Näcke. Ellis first linked the idea of excessive self-love to the Greek myth by using the phrase “Narcissus-like” in 1898, and Näcke added on an -ism to it the following year, to characterize self-absorption around sexual emotion. Freud took this and established the concept of narcissism as we understand it today.

Notably, Freud’s paper breaks narcissism into two parts. Primary narcissism, he argued, is a part of everyone’s psychological makeup. “Loving oneself,” he wrote, is the “libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation.” He linked secondary narcissism, by contrast, to megalomania, a form of delusional grandiosity.

Today, there’s been something of a renaissance of scholarship around narcissism that adds even more dimension to the concept. “Two Faces of Narcissism,” a classic paper published over three decades ago, breaks narcissism into two subcategories—grandiose and vulnerable—the former characterized by “extraversion, aggressiveness, self-assuredness, and the need to be admired by others,” and the latter by “introversion, hypersensitivity, defensiveness, anxiety, and vulnerability.” Today it’s well established that narcissism lies across a spectrum—and that healthy narcissism can be a natural state for everyone.

One of the clinical psychologists leading this charge is Craig Malkin, whose 2015 book Rethinking Narcissism begins with an anecdote about his own mother, crediting her “warmth, optimism, and activism” to the conviction that she was special, and therefore could affect change in the world. Narcissistic behavior, Malkin posits, isn’t just for “arrogant jerks or sociopaths.”

So this Valentine’s Day, perhaps we should get comfortable with the idea that there’s a narcissist in us all. That said, should anyone send you a customized Spotify playlist featuring LCD Soundsystem and Angel Olsen, you have my permission to unmatch.

The post Are We All Narcissists? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But he did not. Almost 50 years later, around 1795, he wrote the story of their love—as fresh and intense as when it happened. Throughout the 19th century, romantic pilgrims retraced his steps from Parma to Geneva, hoping to find Henriette’s engraved message.

“He” was the notorious Giacomo Casanova, and he recounted his youthful affair with Henriette in his monumental autobiography, penned in a remote chateau in Bohemia where he spent his last years as the librarian of a German noble. After a youth in Venice, and a life in Paris, London, Constantinople, Saint-Petersburg, and other cities that took him from riches to misery, from jail to conversations with royalty, and from one beautiful woman to another, this unique adventurer relived his experience through writing it. The resulting legend has never ceased to inspire romantics and playboys, writers, poets, and filmmakers.

Valentine’s Day 2016 is an auspicious moment to reconsider what we know about it. In 2010, the manuscript of Casanova’s “History of My Life” was acquired by the French National Library and became accessible to the public as part of Francophone cultural and historical heritage. Two new scholarly editions are presently appearing in France. A wider readership for the “Life” will rightly discover Casanova’s talent as the creator of his own myth: His fame owes as much to his skill as a writer as it does to his amorous abilities.

Casanova is generally figured as the ultimate seducer. But he was not like the mythical Don Juan, interested solely in increasing the list of his conquests. His reputation rests less on the number—impressive as it may be—of liaisons that he recounts than on their details: the encounter, the courtship, the gradual building of mutual attraction, her wit and her personality, his seductive storytelling blended with erotic innuendos, and finally the lovemaking that both enjoy with abandon.

His tactics could be amusing. During his stay in London, feeling lonely in a city where he hardly knew anyone and didn’t speak the language, he placed an ad in his window looking to sublet an inexpensive apartment in his house to a young lady—provided she spoke Italian, received no male visitors, and kept him company at the dinner table. The ad made London society chuckle and soon brought him Mistress Pauline, a young, beautiful Portuguese noblewoman who, like Henriette, had escaped her family and was awaiting a signal to return home. Casanova fell in love immediately and courted her till she willingly made love to him. He made sure, he asserts, that she enjoyed it as much as he did. Indeed, he believed that both sexes could and should equally delight in erotic pleasure—and even wrote a proto-feminist treatise on women’s physiology and education—which made him unusual for his time.

Thus, while Henriette might have been the most romantic of his loves, Casanova had many more—duchesses, theater actresses, nuns, farm girls and courtesans. But he gave himself earnestly to each. He courted, lavished presents, amused, and helped. He respected female intelligence and wanted talk and company as well as sex. Finally, carried on by what he calls “the demon” of his adventurous destiny, he left for the next one. Unless, as in the case of Henriette, she was the one to leave. Either way, he would remember her—and write about her, lovingly, long after. We know from published letters, as well as from his account, that several of his former lovers also remembered him warmly; he corresponded with several (including Henriette) after they parted.

Casanova’s story is one of a life lived large, with an omnivorous creative appetite. He enjoyed other things as much as lovemaking—preparing a delicate meal for a wayward nun, lavishly masking his carnival companions, gambling through the night even if he lost a fortune. Also exchanging impromptu verses with other poets, creating elaborate hoaxes to convince others of his powers as an alchemist, and shining in a noble salon through his wit. His autobiography gives us a unique representation of 18th century Europe as reflected in one consciousness—from its pleasures (gambling dens and casinos, the Venetian carnival, German spas, the Paris opera, London theaters), to its clothes and food, its means of transportation (gondolas, sleds, boats, and all varieties of carriages), and its exotic places (Corfu, Constantinople, Madrid, Rome). Casanova provides pointed comments on various customs or languages; he describes well-known inns and hotels of his times along with the small objects on which fortunes were spent (snuff boxes, watches, silk stockings and jackets, female bonnets). He sketches the constant financial struggles of adventurers like him along with central beliefs, ideas, and conflicts of the Enlightenment.

Thus, though Casanova is mostly known as an inveterate lover, the diversity of his passions and talents is mind-boggling. He was a financial whiz who helped Louis XV fill up the royal coffers through lottery, a con man who extracted a fortune from a rich marquise adept at alchemy, a mathematician who attempted the long sought (but impossible) “calculation of doubling cubes,” an accomplished poet who translated the “Iliad” into Italian verse, a skilled writer who in one night penned an entire comedy without the sound “r” for an attractive actress with a speech impediment. He was the only prisoner who ever escaped from the notorious Venetian prison “The Leads.” Of course, he made the account of his flight into a narrative so enthralling that it opened to him the most exclusive Parisian salons.

Yet Casanova’s autobiography shows us as well that his character was far from unblemished: He gambled, cheated, and endured financial straits, humiliation, and prison—not to mention the recurring maladies, like syphilis, brought on by his libertine lifestyle. He also systematically refused marriage—the “tomb of love.” His book is honest about his not-so-admirable traits. And if his memory embellished his amorous feats (which, unlike most of the other facts, could not be checked), Casanova also knew to stop his autobiography in good time: It ends before his decline into old age and poverty, preserving for eternity his youthful legend and remaining an enthralling reading for all lovers. He shows how a talent for romance can be part of a much grander passion for life and writing.

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Imagine getting a keepsake made of hair from someone’s head! It would seem morbid. But through the 1800s, Americans showed their feelings with hair. At home, hair was sewn into notebooks, put under glass in lockets, and sent through the mail to loved ones. A large industry for hair products produced earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and wall decorations. While the Valentine’s industry seems recent, Americans have always mixed retail and sincerity; shopping and emotional relationships.

I saw my first piece of hairwork when I was 16 at an antiques show at the Crossroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska. Amongst the postcards and other junk, I found a large button with a woven front of brownish fabric. Though the vendor assured me that the “fabric” wasn’t hair, I bought it for 25 cents and later decided it had to be hair. It was creepy and yet I kept thinking about the loving gesture of the hair enclosed by the metal frame of the button’s edge. When I was getting my doctorate in history, my thoughts returned to that oddly compelling button as I tried to understand how 19th-century Americans used both handmade and commercial objects to define themselves, their memories and relationships, and even death and life. And so I began to study hair art.

These days if you want to feel close to a loved one who’s far away you’re likely to look at a photograph, or even to browse their Facebook or Instagram account. But in earlier times, you might have looked at hair. In 1828, a few days after Valentine’s Day, Walter Mason Oddie, a landscape painter, was at his desk musing about the love of his life, his wife Julia. He unfolded a small scrap of paper to gaze upon a lock of her hair. Three years earlier he had married his Julia, Walter wrote in his diary book, and she was “the constant object of my thoughts [who] has remained an inmate of my bosom – Time has no effect upon my affection.” After that reflection, Walter carefully folded the piece of paper and slid it back into a symbolic bed—an envelope marked “Julia’s March 1824.” It was a home for the hair and a memory for his heart. Possessing someone’s hair was a deeply sentimental way to possess that person.

Hair could soften even the hardest of hearts in the most hard-bitten of men. In 1870, Adelbert Ames, a 35-year-old former U.S. general in the Union Army and a Senator from Reconstruction-era Mississippi—not exactly a softie—met Blanche Butler from Massachusetts. Soon after they met they were engaged and Blanche sent him a locket with her photograph and her hair. She teased: “I am now debating in my own mind the propriety of putting a lock of hair opposite the picture.” Adelbert swooned as only a well-tested fighter of a man could do: “Dear Blanche, I was very glad, happy, to receive your beautiful token—not beautiful, that is secondary—it was dear and precious. Your sweet face and a lock of your beautiful hair. Your hair seemed to bring you very near me. I thank you, Love, for the locket, the picture, and the hair. I shall always wear them.”

For Adelbert and Walter, the hair was much better than a “likeness” or a photograph. Hair was a living part of the person: Its color did not noticeably fade over time; the texture and feel remained the same as it did on the head of the person; and whether the person was living or dead, their memory resided in the lock of hair. Photographic images distorted appearances. Hair wasn’t just symbolic of the person, it was the person—their body, their living material. It was a far more potent carrier of memory than a photograph which only revealed the appearance of a loved one; hair physically brought that person close.

Hairwork in the 19th century could be as simple as Walter’s lock of hair or Blanche’s hair nestled in a locket on Adelbert’s watch chain. It could also be much more ornate, and more about friendship and family than romantic love. Hairwork was often made-to-order by jewelers and the ornate pieces were often worn with a customer’s best outfit. Hairwork could be finely woven beads on a necklace, or bracelets of flat-braided and woven hair to be worn against the skin. Hair was made into wreaths that hung in parlors, into three-dimensional bouquets of ornately knotted hair flowers and leaves kept under glass cloches. Catalogs offered page after page of the same designs, across the country.

This wasn’t a curious gothic-inspired affectation at the time; wearing hair jewelry or displaying hairwork in one’s parlor was to exhibit the best taste in fashion and sentiment. What’s more, it demonstrated that the owner was woven into a web of friends and family and dear ones, displayed in her ears or on a parlor table.

Hairwork was also a perfect consumer product that worked with Americans’ rapidly innovating retail culture. Deeply personalized in material, manufacture, and meaning, it was also generically respected and understood. It was a material so innately personal that the market couldn’t besmirch its sincerity. American fiction, short stories in women’s magazines, the advertisements for the jewelry all assured potential customers that hairwork, while mainstream, was about one’s private sentiment. But that hairwork was likely made in large workshop factories, such as the National Artistic Hair Work Company in Chicago. This balance of the personal and the corporate is as familiar to us as the use of Facebook to share life’s deepest experiences.

But in the 20th century, its meaning began to change. By the 1920s, jewelry wholesalers were selling ready-made hairwork (so who knew whose hair it was made of!) but many saw hairwork as a moldering relic of the Victorian age. It fell out of favor because clothing styles went towards lighter colors and fabrics, and decoration in houses emphasized clean lines. More importantly, the way we showed sincerity changed. In hairwork’s heyday, sincerity was a sentimental expression of honestly held emotions; by the 1920s, effusive displays of emotion seemed overwrought and the ornate lines of hairwork fussy and disingenuous.

Today, we strive to be restrained in our emotional displays—but some things haven’t changed. Jewelers sell upscale “personalized” beads and charms to represent one’s children or family. At my local grocery store in Ohio, the checkers wear rows of Badge-A-Minit pin buttons emblazoned with a daughter’s basketball team photo or a grandchild’s kindergarten portrait. As I interact with them, I know they are in a web of relationships—they love and they are loved by many.

We are still searching for ways to represent relationships that are not about work or the market—the most intimate connections we share with others we want memorialized in an object we can hold, store away, and go back to again and again. We want to buy a way to stop time, to remember the “real” person we love. Walter folded his Julia’s hair back up in its paper bed, and Blanche’s locket still exists attached to Adelbert’s watch chain. Time, as Walter said, has had little effect on affections.

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St. Valentine’s Day is next week and we hope your family celebrates it or not as your custom. However, at school we ignore it as we do not tell children they must love everyone. You need to respect people and treat them kindly, but love is not something we feel indiscriminately. So, please no valentines for the class.

I assumed that there would be a collective sigh of relief. Parents would be spared from having to spend the weekend cutting out Valentine’s Day cards and trying to remember the names of everyone in their child’s class. But not everyone was pleased. One of my parents even shared my e-mail with his workmates and found that it sparked a lively debate of the pros and cons of the ban. Some people were appalled by my message, arguing that to have one day a year when we love everyone is a great thing. Why the bah-humbug position? Here’s my longer answer.

Let me first state that I have no religious objections to the holiday. Yes, I know about the Valentine’s Day Massacre against the Jews in 1349, but that’s only thanks to Google. I don’t think people passing out candy hearts or going out to dinner have massacres on their mind. My immediate family happily exchanges valentines, and we firmly believe that candy offered as an expression of love is calorie-free.

But preschool is a different story. The children at our school range in age from 2 to 5. Two-year-olds are just beginning to understand that other people have feelings. It is not obvious to a young child that just because it hurts when someone hits you, the inverse also holds true. We spend a great deal of time teaching our children that other people have feelings and that everyone at our school has a right to be safe. For our youngest students, this means using words and not hitting or biting. For older students, it means understanding that words can also hurt. You can express anger, but there are appropriate and inappropriate words you can use. Our 4-year-old “superheroes” sometimes have trouble understanding that yelling “I am going to shoot you” or “I am going to kill you” might not be the best way to get a point across. Indeed, they have no real concept of what these words mean.

At the same time, we all know that not everyone you encounter is someone you need to love. Kids know this, in part because they already have some classmates they don’t love. Maybe a classmate is interested in different things, or plays too rough, or says things that hurt your feelings, or just doesn’t behave like someone with whom you’d choose to spend time. We have the same feelings about fellow adults, so why should we impose different standards on our children? Sure, we want our children to give everyone a chance and to treat everyone with respect. But we also want them to be careful about whom they love and to understand that making a commitment of love is a very serious thing. Encouraging children to say “I love you” to everyone does not lay the groundwork for critical thinking about future relationships.

So what is appropriate for a preschool child? In my view, Valentine’s Day is a wonderful time to enter into a family discussion about what makes each member of the family special and what you admire about each other. It’s a time to think about appropriate tokens of love—a special dish that someone loves to eat, a picture you create, a family outing. It’s a time to figure out what makes each family member feel appreciated. It’s a time to ask your children whom they like to play with and help them figure out what it is that they like about those people and why they are drawn to them. Not only does this help your child begin to think about what others add to their lives; it also helps you begin to understand if your child likes really outgoing people or prefers those who are a bit quieter. Don’t forget to share your own feelings: This is a discussion and not a grilling.

So, go buy those cards, flowers, and candy for your loved ones, or decide to ignore the day as a made-up imposition of feelings. And, if you attend the school I direct, leave the heart-shaped cookies and valentines at home.

The post Why My Preschool Is a Valentine Exclusion Zone appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In grammar school, Valentine’s Day was really fun. We’d spend the morning making heart-shaped bags out of pink, red, or purple construction paper. Then we’d have an exchange, and everyone would walk about the room passing out valentines by placing one in each person’s bag. I’d keep looking excitedly at my heart bag as I crossed the room. It would be bursting with candy and cards after a few minutes. That was one of my favorite things about Valentine’s Day: I felt surrounded by friends and liked by everyone.

In elementary school, I was protected by the rule that if you give out valentines, they have to be for everyone. But last year, I started middle school, and that rule didn’t apply anymore. Instead, the school set up a little boutique where you could buy fake roses or candy packages and send a message, and kids would buy them and put them on one another’s lockers.

I’d read in some books that middle school isn’t all roses and candy, but I didn’t believe them. So I was in for a shock. It was Valentine’s Day, but I didn’t get any valentines. At first, I was confused. Why did no one give out valentines this year? Then I noticed that other sixth graders were receiving little candy packages. People were giving out valentines; they just weren’t giving them to me.

This year, in seventh grade, I’m prepared. I am not expecting to receive many valentines, if any. I’m ready to see gleeful girlfriends hugging their boyfriends and numerous lockers with candy-grams on them. Sure, it would be really nice to get valentines, but I’m not so hung up on getting them that I’d be heartbroken if I didn’t get one. My dad says boys are jerks at this age anyway, and many are too shy to send girls valentines. I have no idea what goes on in their heads, but I agree they’re not the friendliest people in the world.

Sometimes I think it would be great if middle school had the valentine rule too, so that people who don’t get anything wouldn’t have to spend Valentine’s Day wishing it were over. But there are about 250 kids in my grade, so that would be a hard rule to follow. Also, when you get older, you start realizing how you really feel about other people, and if you don’t like them it feels strange to give them a valentine.

So this Thursday, I’m just going to keep a low profile and not be discouraged if I don’t get anything. I’ve realized that I’m not the only one without a valentine. In fact, I’ve noticed we are a majority, so what I’m experiencing is something most of us go through. Those books make better sense now. Meanwhile, some of us girls will send each other fake roses. And who knows? Maybe this year I’ll be lucky and have a bunch of secret, or not-so-secret, admirers.

The post Sixth-Grade Valentine’s Day Was a Rude Awakening appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Valentine’s Day starts early for the florists. On February 13th, hours before most people were waking up, the business of buying and selling was underway in the six square blocks that make up L.A.’s Flower District. Zócalo invites our readers to check out the roses before they arrive at your local florist–or at your door.

*Photos by Sarah Rivera.

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