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Out with the pink, bring in the cobalt blue

By Katie Hutchins

Valentine's Day, my first year at Michigan: Two packages arrived at my dorm room -- both were huge heart-shaped chocolate chip cookies. My roommate's heart had a red icing message: "All my love."

My heart was from the same guy, and it said, "Men suck?"

My guy situation was so pathetic that my roommate's love interest felt sorry for me and sent me a Valentine's Day gift too. I brought my cookie into the hall, threw it against the wall and stamped on the shattered pieces, grinding them into the beer-stained carpet. My answer to his question was clear.

Valentine's Day hasn't improved since then.

This year, my gift came two weeks early. My love interest (if you can call him that) dumped me over dessert at Seva and bought me a bottle of sparkling water as compensation.

A bottle of sparkling water? It's a cute bottle -- a unique dark blue color. But water?

This is the latest event in one of those on-again, off-again, platonic then non-platonic relationships many of us are involved in throughout our college careers.

For those who are single and spent Valentine's Day wallowing in drunken misery, weird relationships are typical. Our love stories are severely dysfunctional. One person is desperate to find love and someone to cuddle with on weeknights; the other is interested in a one-night stand. We never like someone "that way" unless we're sure they don't like us. What is it that is so self-destructive about us that we push away our most arduous suitors in favor of the unattainables?

Many engage in the struggle for dates for Valentine's Day, the idiotic and tortuous Sweetest Day, date parties and Friday nights. In all the emotional messes we create, we end up missing out on what might be some of the best experiences life has to offer. What does all the game-playing amount to when -- after four years -- we discover that we've accomplished nothing?

All our marks of success in life are based on tangibles that reaffirm our self-esteems: The relationship, the grades, the good body and the clean room are all marks of achievement that we can point to and say our lives are OK.

But simply having someone to call your significant other doesn't cut it. Just as straight A's -- although nice -- don't indicate that we really know anything, having the best possible boyfriend or girlfriend doesn't mean they bring quality to our lives. But hideous events like Valentine's Day pop up and make us feel inadequate in our social development.

So let's ban it. Ban the pink cookies, the red hearts, the roses and the candy. Hell, let's ban the Relationship altogether. Think of all the time we'd save -- no more phone calls (or waiting for phone calls), no more hours-long laments to our friends about how we've been mistreated. No more prettying up or planning. We can simply live and love those who happen to be around.

The bottle of sparkling water I received as I picked at my vegan cocoa cake might be more symbolic than it first seemed. Its dark electric blue color is the same hue as the mysterious waters of the Chinoyi caves in Zimbabwe. A tiny lake is buried in a maze of caves, and the way the light hits the water gives it an iridescent glow. That glow -- and the feelings it evokes-- have amazed tourists for years. It also connects them, as each person is touched in a slightly different way by the overwhelming aura.

Every person walks away from Chinoyi with a new perspective, and a connection to those who inhabited the caves hundreds of years before. Perhaps our dysfunctional relationships can have significance in the same way. We're all ultimately seeking something similar, and the weird experiences we have in love and loss teach us something new about ourselves.

Touching each other just briefly is enough for us to learn from the people we know so intimately for brief flashes. No matter how trivial the random hook-ups and drunken escapades seem to be, the passion of it all exposes a piece of ourselves that -- if nothing else -- is incredibly real.

It's not the relationship that counts. It's not even the phone call the next day, the profession of love or the hand-holding that makes relationships special. If we stop looking so hard for these symbolic things, we might capture something genuine.