By Bill Donoghue

A friend once said to me, “Valentine’s Day is bullshit!” But does it have to be? I say, “No.” I say, “Let’s take V Day back. For all of us.”

With a quick look at its history, one thing is clear: V Day is freaking tragic. One bloodline traces back to the 3rd century AD. A priest, Father Valentine, was imprisoned for presiding over marriages (which were illegal) and sentenced to death on Feb 14. Awaiting his sentence, as the story goes, he fell in love with the daughter of his jailer, and on the day of his death passed her a note signed “..from your Valentine.”

Boom. V Day.

So my idea: let’s take V Day back to its folklore roots and make it about stories ~ true, embellished, flat out fabrication, what-have-you. A revived oral tradition of tales of loves gone by. Something we all can jam on. Here, I’ll start.

Excerpt from Bill’s Tales of Loves Lost (an installment from my non-existent love diary):

Setting: freshman year of college. A girl: her name was Ivy. She lived upstairs from me. I had it bad for her. I had somewhere in vicinity of 3,000 crushes that year, but this was the first. Lacking any sense of scale or measure, I fell hard for Ivy.

She knew who I was. I think. We ate at the same table a few times and I made a joke once that was funny. Maybe. Regardless, I could contain my feelings no longer and decided to make my move.

Late one afternoon, I muscled my lovelorn body to Ivy’s door and knocked. I stood there, hidden behind an uncomfortably big bouquet of flowers, some <gulp> self-penned poetry clenched firmly in hand. The door opened and there she was. Ivy from upstairs. I was paralyzed in my Pumas. Then she spoke:

Bill. Hi. Wow… Are these for me?…They’re so nice. This is so nice. I can’t believe how <pause> nice this all is…

Who knew “nice” could be such a terrible word? It was all wrong, but there was no turning back. “I was wondering, would you like to go out sometime?” Then the fatal blow. “…Mmmm. No, I don’t think so…” Daggers. I felt like a telemarketer, pushing some paltry wares, who was met with the reply, “We won’t be needing any of those.”

It was awful. No other word for it. And I still had that long walk back downstairs to the cadre of friends I had inexplicably informed of my plan. I still had to step into that den of expectancy and relive the whole thing all over again. “How’d it go??” “…Not well. Not. Well.” But here’s the thing. As heart-crushing as it was, it was fan-tastic! Bitter, but magic-time. Awesome in all it’s awfulness.

Never to be forgotten.

And so it begins. A tip-off to our new V Day. It’s now up to you to get out there this Feb. 14 and relive all your glorious tragedies of heartbreaks gone by.

Give it a whirl. Do a couple of deep knee bends, get in the game and take this holiday back. For all of us.