For most of my life, there have been two certainties about Valentine’s Day: I will not have a date, and my father will send me a jumbo box of chocolates.
Dad moved away when I was a kid, a few years after my parents split. I knew him then as a workaholic who sometimes had to be reminded of my birthday but he never forgot February 14.
As a child, although I never minded getting candy, Dad’s valentine made me a bit sad because it left me wanting more. It reminded me how much I wanted his presence not just his presents.
Once I began dating and Valentine’s Day became a reminder that I wanted to be part of a couple, the sadness turned to pathos. Dad’s heart-shaped box of chocolates, arriving every year with perfect predictability, became for me an excuse to feel sorry for myself because the only man who remembered me on Valentine’s Day was my father.
Most years, I would have a boyfriend at some point. Sometimes the relationship would last several months. But come Valentine’s Day, it seemed as though I was under some sort of curse. No matter how serious my boyfriend and I were, we would always break up before February 14 rolled around.
Some of the breakups were due to simple incompatibility, the sort of thing that can take a while to discover when two people have a strong initial attraction to one another. Actually, when it comes down to it, I was incompatible with all the men I’ve dated; I don’t believe that any of my past boyfriends, had I acted differently, could have become the great love of my life. But I now realize that the overriding reason most of my relationships ended as they did was because of premarital sex.
From as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be married. I also had the feeling that I would be happiest if I reserved sex for marriage. This was confirmed for me once I lost my virginity. Having sex with men who were not married to me who would go all the way physically but not emotionally hurt me inside.
It hurt me, because I keenly felt the intense intimacy of the act that I was synchronizing my every motion and breath to that of my boyfriend, letting him get as close to me as was physically possible, literally under my skin. Such intimacy was painful when I knew that my boyfriend could, if he wanted, easily walk out the door afterwards and be out of my life and I could do the same if I chose.
No matter what people say about marriage not being certain — and I’m well aware of that because of the failure of my own parents’ union — a sexual relationship outside of marriage, when either partner can walk away with complete impunity, is infinitely less secure.
The physical vulnerability I experienced in sexual intimacy was intolerable when coupled with the risk of rejection. So I created a dichotomy, to protect myself. The more I would open myself up physically to a man, the more I would harden myself emotionally, closing myself off in order to stay in control and not get hurt.
I told myself that I could always open myself up as the relationship progressed, once I felt secure. But that never happened and the very act of emotional detachment only made me less capable of sharing the love that I fervently wanted to experience.
Avoiding sex was out of the question, and not just because I enjoyed it. I believed that no man would marry me unless he had sex with me first.
For a man to forgo sex until he and I exchanged vows, he would have to love me so much that he would seek my greater good. I did not believe that any man would do that, because I did not believe a man would see anything in me that would be more important to him than his own sexual desire. My intrinsic value, I thought, was dependent upon my being willing to put out sans vows.
That all changed after I became a Christian at age 31 and began to explore chastity.
When I first started living chastely, I tried to tell myself that Valentine’s Day was just like any other day. There was no need to treat it with such superstition, as though my love life would be ruined for the entire year if I wasn’t treated to a candlelight meal on February 14.
The curse lifted a bit. I stopped obsessing about my loneliness and started to count my blessings, becoming more thankful for friends, family, church, and opportunities to reach out to help people outside my single-woman bubble. Dad’s chocolates became less depressing and my co-workers sure appreciated my sharing them. But ultimately I still felt that there was something special about Valentine’s Day, and that something existed for other people not me.
It wasn’t until 2005, when I was in my first-ever relationship with a man who shared my commitment to chastity, that I began to understand the meaning of my father’s annual gift.
When Dad sent me those Valentine’s chocolates, his generosity was not relative to my gratitude. I didn’t have to do anything to earn the gift. All I had to do was exist. Even though at times I resented Dad’s giving me one thing when I really wanted another, he was nonetheless giving me a gift, out of the goodness of his heart.
Most of all, Dad’s gift taught me that his love was always there, regardless of whether it was welcome. Those heart-shaped boxes represented his opening up his heart to me, year after year.
Entering a chaste relationship, I realized more than ever that love means putting myself on the line like my father does. It’s a lesson I could have learned when I was unattached, but I think I especially needed to learn it within a relationship, because that’s the toughest and best way to unlearn all the defense mechanisms I used in the past. A supreme irony of chaste dating is that the longer you develop your relationship while keeping your clothes on, the more naked you feel.
My boyfriend and I parted well before Valentine’s Day 2006 rolled around. If I were cynical, I could say the curse struck again. But I don’t feel that way, because even though the relationship ended, there was something about it that makes me hopeful — something fundamentally different from the way my previous relationships unfolded.
Despite my personal foibles, and there are many, I made a real effort to give of myself to my boyfriend, and he did the same for me. I allowed myself to be vulnerable with him admittedly, not as vulnerable as I could have been, but still, more so than I had been with any man to whom I gave my body.
After we broke up, instead of resolving to try harder not to be hurt, I resolved to try harder to be even more vulnerable, more giving, more loving in my next relationship. That has since caused me pain. But there is a difference between my mistakes now and my mistakes before I was chaste, because I now am making them within a sincere effort to open myself up rather than closing myself off.
Ultimately, I’m learning how to give one man the kind of love that I’m supposed to give to everyone–love that is consistent, unconditional, personal, and persistent. That’s the love that my father has given me all these years the love I was reminded of yesterday when a beautiful tin of Godiva chocolates materialized on my doorstep.
Happy Valentine’s Day, Dad. I love you. And thanks to your chocolates, there’s more of me to love.
– Dawn Eden is author of the Thrill of the Chaste.