Celebrating Valentine's Day this weekend by spending Saturday night with my lovely wife at a local hotel, away from the grown teenagers and the home that has been more office than home for nearly a year now.
We are still madly in love with each other, despite having to spend our working days in fairly close quarters, especially this winter. As a result, there have been a growing number of roommate days, where we spend our free time after work alone, watching TV, reading, crafting and going for walks. She is exhausted by my reality TV viewing (news, sports and documentaries) and her reality TV viewing (90 Day Fiancé, Below Deck, The Incredible Dr. Pol) encourages me to do the laundry, iron shirts and scrub the bathroom.
It's only been in recent years that I've become a fan of Valentine's Day. I don't care about its origins or its commercialization. I only care that it is another day on the calendar - along with birthdays, anniversary, Christmas, Mother's Day and Father's Day - to put life on pause to show some extra love.
My relationship with love itself has evolved through my adult life and there have been so many lessons, both sweet and bitter.
The result has been embracing love in different forms, rather than putting romantic love on a pedestal and diminishing other forms of love.
These days, I don't just tell my spouse and my kids how much I love them.
I now tell my parents I love them, something that simply wasn't on the menu from my teenaged years all the way to middle age. I am blessed to have two healthy living parents still married to one another. Not telling them I love them seems downright rude and unappreciative.
I also tell my dear friends I love them. In all but one case, they said it first because I was shy but once they opened the door, I just waltzed right in.
And when this COVID thing is all over, there will be much hugging, some of it inappropriate and uncomfortable but it will come from that loving place in my heart.
As I was writing this, reporter Christine Hinzmann informed me in an email “you know I luv ya like a boss!”
I’ll take it.
Even if I think her “luv” is actually gratitude that my recent doctor’s appointment was of minor concern, I won’t be away on illness and – most importantly - she won’t have to do my job in my absence (other than next week while I’m off on vacation).
Christine and I have worked together for many years. She has seen me at my best and my worst, as I have with her. Being in the trenches together – even in a manager/employee relationship - with people for a long time builds trust and respect, core elements of love.
So yes, I love Christine and my reporting team. They have been outstanding for years and especially in the last 12 months. Despite all of us taking 20 per cent wage cuts since the end of last March to keep our doors open when ad revenues crashed, they have excelled in their four-day work weeks. Our website traffic is up 40 per cent from last year and I love getting the regular calls and emails from grateful readers about our recent work.
I even love the calls and emails from annoyed readers, complaining about everything from spelling mistakes to what we’re covering, how we’re covering and why we’re not covering other things. Those calls mean they’re reading our work and they care so much about it that they took time out of their day to tell me about it.
So, yes, I love my job and the 36 years I have devoted to this career.
Maybe it’s COVID, maybe it’s getting another year older, maybe it’s Valentine’s Day and the longer days and the bright sunshine this week but I find myself in a lovely and loving mood.
Sadly, a statement like that sounds sickeningly sweet. Positive love that isn’t our own is uncomfortable at best, repulsive at worst and completely elusive to proper expression through words that doesn’t trivialize it (although there have been excellent attempts by our finest poets).
The downside of love and all of the feelings and consequences that come with it are far more fertile ground for study and discussion. Put another way, Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart is a much better and more interesting song than Captain and Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together.
But that’s just what I love.
You do you and love it.
