Valentine's Day musings

No wonder then that one of the V-Day events around the world focuses on domestic abuse victims – perhaps those who believed too much in the validity of such a day. Women who clung on to bad relationships in the hope that their men would change for the better because of relentless loving on their part, that these men would not one day kill or maim them in an angry fit.

Britain’s charity against domestic abuse, Safe Lives, launched their Valentine’s campaign to celebrate the strength of female and male victims. The myth that short temper behind closed doors is just a man thing that women must put up with is slowly being exploded. Love in the case of some is just good luck to stay alive.

Let’s look at a live example of seeming true love, as in matrimonial longevity. Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas, who passed away recently, is survived by his 100-year-old wife, Anne. Their conjugal bliss, complete with the love letters they wrote to each other even after marriage, is compiled into a book Kirk and Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter and a Lifetime in Hollywood. In this, they chronicle their premarital doubts and their post-coital purring. They met in 1953; she was his language assistant in France.

After a fight, he writes to her, 'Suddenly it seems stupid I am going to dinner without you.' She writes to him, 'I want to be loved and loved – and loved again.' She tells him she likes the idea of waiting for him in the evening when he comes home from work and he pens to her from another country after marriage and fatherhood, ‘How is it that when I am away from you, such love for you overwhelms me that at 2.30 in the morning I awake to write to you?’

The book has its readers divided – is it plastic or real, this passion they flaunt in flamboyant words? Can sentimental, syrupy love survive long years of togetherness?

One can mock these letters as a wifely ignoring of husbandly infidelities, or salute them as a triumph of this crazy little thing called love.