The commercialization of love

I grew up when Valentine’s Day was a strange custom, too difficult for young people to comprehend, much less practice.

Not that we were not taught to cut hearts out of red Cartolina to decorate the school’s bulletin boards. Or urged to make individual valentine’s cards, just in case we wished to publicly declare or acknowledge affection for somebody in class.

That was the way in small towns in those rather uncomplicated days. We aped everything American, from playing Santa Claus to reciting the “Gettysburg Address” to celebrating the day of hearts in ways today’s marketing geniuses of Hallmark Cards, Godiva Chocolates or, closer to home, the flower merchants of La Trinidad, Baguio would have approved of.

We were most awkward about this thing called love. We skirted the related question of sex and focused solely on romance, but largely of the platonic kind. Good boys and girls were not allowed to engage in sex before marriage. And of course, marriage was the be-all and end-all of love, and it involved parents and the entire community because it was supposed to last forever.

Love may have seemed innocent and fancy-free, but it came freighted with stern warnings and absolute prohibitions. Example: never touch the merchandise because it will be deemed sold and for immediate delivery. No exchange, no return. Boy or girl, you’re only given one chance at marriage and you better not blow it.

Boys had one distinct advantage: they could run away or indulgent parents shielded them from shotgun weddings. Whether they got pregnant or not, wayward girls were considered damaged goods. They had to be passed off as virgins somewhere else far away, where nosey people didn’t bother with the equivalent of marital credit investigation.

I can’t blame today’s teenagers and young lovers for laughing hard at the positively antediluvian values and practices that tormented their parents’ and past generations. In our day, pills and condoms were unheard of. Intended or not, pregnancy meant instant wedlock, no ifs, ands or buts. Safe abortions were rare and unheard of. The crippling burden of shame or guilt was something else.

There was no individual dating, just school dances where the sexes were segregated in opposite ends of the hall. Dancing was a matter of “hele-hele bago quire” or literally dragging reluctant pairs to the dance floor. The taboo about touching led to girls being taught how to push their left hands to the guys’ shoulders to prevent direct body contact. Very few daring couples danced cheek-to-cheek or tried the “dip” when nobody was looking. But the girls always paid the heavy price of being labeled sluts and otherwise deemed disqualified from proper marriages.

Although guys appeared exempt from the fallout of hypocrisy, the truth was that they were also blacklisted in more subtle ways than one. Prospective in-laws knew how to ferret out rascals; it’s besotted females who defied grave parental warnings, often to their eternal regret in the not-too-distant future.

In my small circle of nerdy boys, we took love and marriage very seriously. “If I expect my bride to be a virgin,” said my best friend, who went on to become a pastor in Canada, “I also have to be a virgin on our wedding night.”

As far as our pre-Opus Dei crowd was concerned, there was no sowing of wild oats with obliging housemaids. We sought no cheap solace from ladies of the night who were there to   “break-in” fumbling adolescent boys. We were called sissies and worse, but we were undeterred. Many of the smart alecks who tormented us no end, incidentally, ended up with bad and unhappy marriages, some more than once.

How did we come upon or adopt values that were already considered pathetically laughable in our semi-liberated era?

Well, we were raised high up in the mountains of Mindanao, a few light years away from the slowly changing morals of Manila in the conservative but restless 1950s. We were country bumpkins in all matters of civilization, especially in love and sex.

There was hardly any challenge to fictional true love and repressed sex where we lived and where our basic beliefs were set for life.

I cannot speak for the Roman Catholics because I went to Baptist Church. What I can say is that our church brooked nothing worldly or sinful — no smoking or drinking, no movies except The Ten Commandments and the life of Martin Luther. What finally alienated me came in my senior year in high school the day after our Saturday junior-senior prom when everybody had fun dancing The Twist, the dance craze of the late 1950s.

“Last night,” our enraged pastor thundered from the pulpit as my friends and I sat like felons on trial in the front pews, “some of our young people sinned. They were dancing to the music of the devil.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. The Twist was evil? We kids assumed it was the kind of dance our elders would not raise any furor about. Nobody held hands or embraced as in the Tango, Cha-Cha or Slow Drag. We just wiggled and twisted our hips; it did not matter whether you were dancing with a boy or a girl. It was a group or tribal dance set to rousing music like the polka, if you could call it that.

Anyway, we had to apologize against our will in front of the disapproving congregation. This left a bad taste in the mouth. My disenchantment led me out of Baptist fundamentalism and towards the spirit of ecumenism that attracted me not long after in college. I did not turn to Roman Catholicism, but to the idea of meditating alone, late at night in the absolute silence of UP’s Church of the Holy Sacrifice. In my US exile, I went to Methodist Church, a very secular and tolerant religion.

Over and above our childhood isolation in Bukidnon, there was the disturbing but eye-opening influence of Hollywood movies that touched on the brewing youth rebellion of the day. Remember that the movies then subscribed to a strict moral code that has since been abandoned with a vengeance. There was no pornography of the kind that’s so brazenly unapologetic and pervasive today.

What was considered immoral was depicted on screen, but as negative examples to teach people why they should stick to the straight and narrow path. The immoral and evil types were always punished in the end; they either faced cinematic deaths or were held out as tragic characters never to be emulated. One such harrowing movie was Peyton Place with Lana Turner and Arthur Kennedy, which exposed us to the terrible power of small-town hypocrisy and intolerance.

Splendor in the Grass starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty was another shocker. Natalie’s character gave in to desire too easily and was condemned as a bad girl unworthy of marriage to the handsomest and richest boy in town. She had a nervous breakdown and was sent off to a mental asylum; he’s packed off to Yale where he soon dropped out after his father committed suicide upon losing his fortune in the 1929 market crash. The unfortunate male ended up a poor farmer and married a waitress.

Next time the former lovers met years later was a bittersweet moment about missed opportunities and deep regrets that were echoed, of course, by William Wordworth’s haunting poem on the timeless follies of youth.

Life imitated art in our town but with happier results. One bright and strong-willed girl from a leading family went to college in Cebu and fell in love with a townmate from a good but impoverished family.

This story was a tearjerker straight out of the Tagalog movies. But of course, the girl’s uppity parents were outraged and demanded that the couple immediately part ways. Just like that. The couple refused and were thrown out of the girl’s wealthy family to fend for themselves.

I was a witness to this textbook case of how narrow-minded parents and conniving people in the community could get in the way of honest love and basic human decency. The outcasts were forced to rent a small room in a dingy old house near the elementary school. She offered piano lessons to earn some cash to feed themselves and their baby. He did odd jobs in a town where word was out not to have anything to do with them.

My mom was one of those who defied the ban by enrolling me as one of girl’s few paying students. I recall her indignant mother coming to our house to get Mom to cooperate with the family’s unforgiving crusade to “teach our daughter a lesson.”

The couple and their baby were compelled to leave town to seek their fortune elsewhere. She went back to school on scholarships, her husband working on the side and fully supportive of his wife’s high academic aspirations.

Many years later, I met her again — a successful career woman with a PhD and several books on ethnic literature to her credit. She even spoke good Spanish, having gone to Madrid for further studies. Their love and marriage endured. I don’t know if they were ever forgiven by her overbearing parents. But I thought that that was completely unnecessary because the couple had made it on their own.

What have I learned about love down the years?

My skeptical attitude about Valentine’s Day and all that jazz remains unchanged. I feel we must focus on the beauty and purity of love, not on its boundless commercial and sybaritic possibilities. Finding love is finding your soulmate and that calls for personal celebration, not a mass orgy of conspicuous affection and consumption. In this sense, any day can be Valentine’s Day, to be marked without having to climb to the rooftops or maxing out anybody’s credit limit.

Just consider the dubious pagan origins of this Feb. 14 celebration that’s only second to New Year’s Eve in pushing hotels, restaurants, night clubs, jewelers, florists, airlines, department stores and other businesses to the heights of creative and profit-oriented frenzy.

There may have been more than one St. Valentinus in pre-Christian third-century Rome, the best known martyred for his Christian beliefs and for casting a covetous eye on a girl named Julia, the blind daughter of his jailer. This sob story of martyrdom, not romance (theirs was unrequited and from a brutal distance) did not gain traction until the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer turned it into a parable of courtly love some 10 centuries later in the High Middle Ages.

But it was Victorian England of the 19th century that gradually turned Chaucer’s Valentine romanticism into a global phenomenon, starting with the exchange of handmade cards and graduating into a commercial vehicle for the empire’s chocolate and perfume makers. The purveyors of luxury goods and services from champagne to diamonds could not be far behind.

Just like Christmas and Mother’s Day, Valentine’s started out as a simple but charming idea that evolved over time and became a universal mania because it made eminent entrepreneurial sense. Love became grander and more outlandish than ever as the merchants plumbed the labyrinths of fantasy and greed. We have to rescue the purest of all human emotions from the grubby hands of these charlatans of honeyed words and extravagant promises. 

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E-mail the author at noslen7491@gmail.com.