A Sonnet in Vain

Valentine's Day is a dangerous thing. We've all been conned into the belief that it's a magical time, designed to give star-crossed lovers their great chance at happiness, when the only great chance it's ever really provided me is for pain and rejection.

I always thought it should be the perfect venue to score big points off of the years of training in being a sensitive, caring, romantic 90s kind of guy I got from growing up with my mother and sister.

I figured if there was any time of the year that sort of thing would pay off, Valentine's Day would be it, but every time I've tried to show off my skills in wooing with warmth and tenderness, the cold, hard realities of the world have squashed my little dreams.

At first I thought my romantic woes could be attributed to minor errors in execution. For my first girlfriend, I figured, "What could be more romantic than a candle-light dinner on Valentine's Day?" One I made myself, of course.

Or maybe not. This was, of course, in the days before I took Foods and Nutrition I (the best class I took in high school), so I cut a few corners. Yeast, for example. How important could that be in the grand scheme of bread? So I forgot to take the plastic covering off of the ham and didn't preheat the oven, but what are details when it comes to love?

So after this painful example of the importance of details in love, I honed my technique. By junior year in high school, I thought I had it all figured out.

It was time to go for the more conventional approach. My then-girlfriend had the lead in the school play and the last show was that night.

During the afternoon, I bought a box of chocolates and a dozen roses and composed a sonnet declaring my undying love which I inscribed in the leaf of a copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Nothing could stop me this time.

Except her ex-boyfriend of the last year-and-a-half who had been in college in Chicago and, as it turned out, skipped classes to hitchhike back in time to see her in the play before having to rush back to school the next morning.

Before the play, I saw him, he saw me. We had been friends once. We exchanged perfunctory greetings, but the smirk on his face told me he knew my five-minute drive across town couldn't quite match the coolness of his Jack Kerouac move.

All right, so I knew the chips were down, but I still had a few aces up my sleeve. This was, after all, a woman who admitted to having been seriously persuaded by John Donne's poem "The Flea" ("Mark but this flea and mark in this,/ How little that which thou deny'st me is..."), so I figured a well-timed sonnet could make all the difference.

I smirked back and sat confidently through the rest of the play. I even let him find her afterwards first, so he could make his little move only to be swept away by my romantic genius.

I was, however, standing close enough to them when he found her on the wing of the stage to hear a few phrases here and there.

"Oh my God, a sapphire ring--I've wanted one of these all my life," for example, came through pretty well.

Still holding a modicum of hope, I handed her the sonnet. She said, "Oh. The rhyme scheme is right and everything."

I beat a hasty retreat and gave the flowers and chocolates to my mother.

Meanwhile he took her to a hill overlooking the entire town and the Mississippi River as it bends off into the distance and, a friend of hers later told me, stayed there for hours, whispering in her ear how much he loved her.

The two of them are now living happily ever after in an apartment in Chicago. They're probably still whispering sweet nothings in each other's ears. How happy for them.

I, however, will use this Valentine's Day for its true purpose: wallowing in self-pity.