Conversation Hearts, Part Three

BE TRUE

Sugar and spice and everything nice! Senior year of college found a staggering number of us co-ed cupids sans steadies, or even the potential for same. What were girls of a certain age to do about this? Answer: celebrate the plain and simple fact that whilst boys may come and go, girlfriends are forever--aka, celebrate the sisters of Eve with affection and aplomb. To this end, we declared the motto for that year's V-Day to be No Lovin' and made up signs to that effect and posted them all over the house. We used our latent decoupage skills to create personal ad valentines for ourselves and our friends, each with her own slogan and the silliest photo we could find (mine was "date with an angel.") I have no idea what we did that Valentine's Day proper, but I imagine it involved black and tans at the local quackhouse and a lot of laughing. And all the prixe fixe menus, long-stemmed roses, and Victoria's Secret outfits in the world cannot in my estimation hold a candle to the romance of a lifetime--the one you can have, if you are lucky, with your gal pals.

I am a lucky chick in oh-so-many respects. And the one aspect of my life that makes me hands-down the luckiest girl in the world? I have the best girlfriends going. As Charlotte York once observed, "Maybe we could be each others soulmates? And then we could let men be just these great nice guys to have fun with?" Well said, you little Park Avenue princess. Coupled or estranged, my favorite V-Days have never lacked for lovin'--just not the wham-bam-thank-you-man kind. Two years back a crowd of friends (both men and women) had a good dinner and caught a movie--that was a good V-Day. In years past I have indulged in fun girly things like bath oils and Jane Austen novels as tokens of my affection for the ladies who lunch with me. These bitches throw down all E.E. Cummings-style--they have my heart, and they carry it with them wherever they go, and I carry theirs. No fancy gestures. No false promises. No delusions of grandeur. No sex either because, well, as we collectively discerned about the time No Lovin' V-Day was declared, we all like Dick Whitman. Before we knew who that was.....

Point made, point taken. It's a groovy kind of love, that of the sisterhood. And it makes us all that much more ready and able to romance those great nice guys that come along--if and when they do. In the meantime and in-between time trust me, we got fun. Lesson #3, barely legal: equal pay for equal work sometimes means benefits that far outweigh the occasional bonus.