The truth is, ninety-nine percent of the population is miserable on Valentine's Day. h.e.l.l, the holiday commemorates a ma.s.sacre. Shouldn't that tell us something? Come February 14, the singles feel wretched and excluded, and the couples feel under enormous pressure to live up to some fatuous romantic fantasy cooked up by Hallmark: Show me the flowers. Cough up the jewelry. Load me up on Prozac and take me out to dinner. Every relationship is thrown into a kiln for twenty-four hours, where it's forced to withstand pressure and heat.

Personally, I think we should revert the holiday back to its pagan roots. Long before the Catholic Church turned it into a tribute to a beheaded Christian, Valentine's Day was apparently a pagan fertility rite, sort of like a racy version of spin-the-bottle. In the fourth century B.C., young men drew the names of eligible young women randomly from a box. Whomever they picked became their companion for "mutual entertainment and pleasure" until the next year's lottery.

While I'm not suggesting that we raffle off single women to adolescent boys-or anybody to anybody-surely some sort of inclusive chocolate baccha.n.a.lia has got to be better than the current incarnation of the holiday. Because, first of all, who besides sixteen-year-old prom queens really has fun on Valentine's Day? And, second of all, do lovers really need a holiday? When you're in love, every day is potentially February 14. I say we let Valentine's Day be a day when the lovelorn get their share of the goodies and attention, when we celebrate with the celibate, dine with the divorced, and send sweets to the soloists and the starry-eyed alike. Make it a day when everyone gets to feel loved! But until this happens, I say we should all just eat a couple of heart-shaped chocolates and go to bed early.

FAIRY TALE NUMBER 9.

Lesbians have it easier.

In certain circles (particularly on college campuses), it's taken as informal gospel that lesbians have better relationships than straight couples because there's no power imbalance or oppressive gender roles involved. As if most lesbians don't have to fight for their relationships every step of the way. As if they don't have to love covertly or risk losing their jobs, being disowned, and getting beaten up by gangs of Neanderthal teenagers. As if they aren't made into political scapegoats by every hate-monger from here to Capitol Hill. As if love doesn't turn everybody into a vulnerable, dithering moron.

FAIRY TALE NUMBER 10.

Straights have it easier.

In certain circles, it's taken as informal gospel that heteros.e.xual couples have it easier than lesbians because straights can show their love overtly, have ostentatious weddings, and have the entire culture aggressively reaffirm their commitment. Yeah, well, the reason that the entire culture aggressively reaffirms straight commitments is because they have to. Men and women often don't really understand each other, trust each other, or even like each other. Unless enormous amounts of pressure are exerted on us, chances are we might remain just the way we were in sixth grade-boys on one side of the room, girls on the other-with maybe an occasional foray into the supply room for "Three Minutes in the Closet." Besides, love turns everybody into a vulnerable, dithering moron.

FAIRY TALE NUMBER 11.

Bis.e.xuals have it easier.

As Woody Allen said, "If you're bis.e.xual, you have twice as many chances of getting a date." True, but n.o.body trusts you, either. Besides, love turns everybody into a vulnerable, dithering moron.

FAIRY TALE NUMBER 12.

Love is pure bliss.

Yeah, and when you pull this leg, it plays "Jingle Bells." Like my grandma said: Love is anarchy. It turns everybody into a vulnerable, dithering moron.

You know what's the first thing Cinderella really did after the prince whisked her away to the castle to live happily ever after? She had a ma.s.sive anxiety attack, called her therapist about "intimacy issues," and downed two bottles of Xanax.

Now that this has been cleared up, let's go forth and love with abandon!

Chapter 11.

Marriage Ain't Prozac.

Right now, there are two things in my life that need to be done:.

me and my laundry. I want to marry a man who can do both.

-OPHIRA EDUT.

When I was five years old, the one thing I wanted to be more than anything else was a Bride. A girlie-girl of the First Order, I thought brides were the bomb. And since I had an inordinate amount of free time on my hands, I spent a lot of it walking around the house in my mother's white-chiffon nightgown with a doily on my head.

Needless to say, this thrilled my relatives.

"Oh, look! Susie's getting married!" they'd coo approvingly. "Who's the groom?"

Groom? What groom?

As far as I was concerned, "bride" was about being fabulous and adored. "Bride" was about having a tiara. "Bride" was about being the center of attention. What did any of this have to do with a groom?

But the adults said, "Surely, you can't be a bride if you don't have a groom."

And there you have it.

By age five I had absorbed basically everything that drives ninety-nine percent of all women crazy for the rest of our lives. Little else makes us gals quite so anxious as the issue of "marriage." Whether we're gay or straight, puritan or progressive, we've learned by osmosis that society still considers marriage to be the centerpiece of our lives, the defining achievement for a girl. Between our relatives and The Rules, we're under a lot of pressure. Only brides live happily ever after, we're taught: A husband holds the key to our happiness.

In the words of my five-year-old self: Barf.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking marriage-for either straight or gay gals. In the early days of the women's movement, some feminists claimed that straight women didn't need men, that we were better off without them. Well, I don't buy that fairy tale, either. Let me be the first to admit that I'm not one of those lucky autonomous women whose idea of bliss is to go to the movies alone with n.o.body buggin' them. I've usually been f.u.c.king miserable when I've been single. And I'm still walking around with that lace doily on my head. Well, metaphorically, anyways.

But as a progressive prima donna, I certainly don't buy that "every Princess needs a Prince" scenario, either. I mean, h.e.l.lo. This is the twenty-first century. If I decide to ride off into the sunset all by myself, that's just as legit, thank you very much. Ditto for if I decide to ride off with another princess.

Plus, as a member of a generation whose parents divorced in record numbers, I also know that real marriage is real complicated. Those "drive-thru" wedding chapels in Las Vegas are insane. They perpetuate the myth that marriage is a Happy Meal-a quick, easy source of gratification and presents. Excuse me, but a good marriage requires serious effort. The least you can do is get out of your car.

Any honest married person will admit this: Marriage can be joyous, but it's also an out-and-out wrestling match between Romance and Disappointment, Expectation and Compromise. Tellingly, when Ann Landers was once asked what problems plague Americans the most, she replied, "The poor want to be rich, the rich want to be happy, the single want to be married, and the married want to be dead."

That should tell us something right there.

The good news, of course, is that American women today are among the first women in history who don't absolutely have to marry for protection, survival, and acceptance. We have the unprecedented luxury of choice: whether to marry, whom to marry, when to marry, and how to marry. We have power and options-and marriage itself has been legally transformed from the glorified master-and-servant relationship of the past into a more equal partnership.

All of this should be a fabulous thing for females! We finally have some control over our own emotional, s.e.xual, spiritual, and financial destiny! The ability to make smart decisions, to make sure we're well suited to our match! Yippee! Uncork that bubbly. Throw that rice in the air. Tell that polka band from Astoria, Queens, to start playing "Respect."

Unfortunately, however, we gals are so imbued with fantasies about marriage that, too often, we approach wedlock in a state of desperation or delusion.

If we're gay, of course, marriage has been cordoned off with razor wire by sanctimonious morons-so that if we do find somebody we want to live with and care for until death do us part, things are complicated right from the start. The best that lesbians can hope for right now is to cobble together a "domestic partnership" through various legal loopholes, inclusive policies, and progressive places of worship. It's sort of wedlite instead of wedlock. Better than nothing, I suppose, but still not great for the old blood pressure.

Yet if we're straight, deciding to marry is not exactly a three-tiered cakewalk either.

Thanks to our culture, many of us view marriage through a mindset of scarcity. We're told that if we don't "hurry up" and "find" a husband, all the "good ones" will be "taken." So our search for a partner becomes like hunting for a Prada blouse during a one-day sale at Neiman-Marcus. We race to the store, tear through the racks like a maniac looking for something that "fits," and hope that we'll beat the other shoppers to the best bargain before closing time. The fact that we have to choose one outfit to wear every single day for the rest of our lives just makes us even more insane.

Others of us are so convinced we have to be married that we effectually subject ourselves to a shotgun wedding-except that we're the ones holding the pistol, and often we're holding it to our own head, if not to our boyfriend's. We will a marriage to occur just so we can be capital-M married.

Still others of us are so blinded by fantasy, so ga-ga over engagement rings and white dresses, that we really can't see past the veil over our heads. We walk down that aisle with great expectations but absolutely no clue.

Most people will agree that the decision to say "I do" should not be made lightly. And yet there is so much pressure on women to say yes automatically-to say yes for the wrong reasons-and to say yes unequivocally. We're rarely encouraged to think rationally about marriage: It's considered antiromantic. It suggests we're somehow lacking real pa.s.sion and love. Nor are we encouraged to entertain much doubt-or to accept that, Hey, all aspects of life are uncertain. Get used to it.

In how many fairy tales does the princess tell the prince that she needs some "time to think"? That she's not sure she's "really ready"? That she "wants to work out certain issues" before she commits to spending the rest of her life in his castle?

Ideally we gals should commit to someone out of strength and desire-not fantasy or fear. This is difficult, I know. Like I said, I've walked around with that doily on my head. For that matter, I've also gone to sleep alone and teary-eyed, convinced I would never find someone as I listened to the clock tick. And when I finally did meet my Monsieur Right, people put so much pressure on me to get engaged right away, it's a wonder I didn't start producing oil.

But why relinquish our power? As my grandmother used to say, "Any two idiots can get married. And they usually do."

It's marrying well-or deciding not to-that takes real savvy. So let's forget the poofy dresses and gla.s.s slippers for a moment, and try these words of wisdom on for size instead.

1. Holy matrimony is not the holy grail. Certainly if it does resemble the holy grail, it's closer to the Monty Python movie. After the quest for a life partner is over, life itself continues. And this life has the potential to be just as tumultuous, frustrating, and ridiculous as singlehood.

Marriage won't transform a cleaning lady into a princess or a beast into a prince. "A lot of people think that once they're married, their spouses will change dramatically and all the problems in their relationship will disappear," a marriage counselor told me. "That's just not true. Any problems you have before the wedding will still be there after the honeymoon."

In fact, if "Cinderella" was written to reflect the real deal, her story might go something like this: After P.C. [Prince Charming] and Cindy got back from their honeymoon, they had an idyllic month at the castle until Cindy's mother in-law, the queen, announced she was moving in. When Cindy told P.C. that either his mother was leaving or she was, P.C. said that she was one to talk, seeing as her own stepmother was quite a piece of work. Besides, he yelled, "You were nothing but a cleaning lady before you met me!"

After babies, diapers, and years of petty arguments, Cindy had a brief fling with a pharmacist whom she met over the Internet, then got addicted to Percocet. P.C. lost a chunk of money in a Ponzi scheme and survived an unspectacular midlife crises than included an Alfa Romeo and a bulimic Brazilian debutante. In their later years, the couple discovered in-line skating and v.i.a.g.r.a. After Cindy had her hip replaced, they retired to Boca, where they spent the rest of their days. .h.i.tting the early-bird specials, playing mah-jongg, and driving with their left blinker on.

2. A wedding isn't a marriage. At age five, I perceived marriage as a dress, a party, and a spotlight. Unfortunately, there's a whole industry dedicated to perpetuating this idea for females until we're, oh, fifty.

An entire bridal industry is dedicated to feeding and exploiting our childhood dreams, to helping us obsess about stuff like a dress that makes us look like a giant puff pastry! Ice swans! And getting every female in our wedding party to sh.e.l.l out four hundred dollars for a chartreuse taffeta dress and dyed-to-match pumps that will make her look like a giant romaine lettuce and that she will never, ever wear again.

(I'm sorry, but bridesmaid dresses are s.a.d.i.s.tic. I mean, is that really any way to treat people we love? To stage fascist, expensive photo-ops that essentially reduce everyone to a color-coordinated backdrop for our dress? I say: Give our gal-pals a break. Tell them to keep their dresses simple, and save their money for the presents.) Most ironically, in these scenarios the groom becomes practically irrelevant. He might as well be a doork.n.o.b.

Given all this hoopla over the wedding being "our day," is it any wonder that we can confuse the ritual with the reality?

A few years ago, one of the syndicated talk shows ran a feature called "Women Who Can't Stop Watching Their Wedding Videos." Many of the women on it had grown up believing that their wedding day would be "their day"-the most important day of their life.

The problem was, their wedding day was not just "their day" but "their only day."

Their wedding was really the one time when they were allowed to run the whole d.a.m.n show, demand exactly what they wanted, and be the center of attention. After it was over, they were devastated. They were suddenly somebody's traditional, doormatty wife-no longer a bride or a beauty. And so they relived their wedding again and again through the VCR, trying to recapture their moment of dominion and glory.

Weddings are sacred but, hey: Every girl is ent.i.tled to more than one special day in her life. Let's make sure everyone doesn't forget this.

3. A husband should suit our personality, not our checklist. Years after I first paraded around as a bride, I had a boyfriend who was gung ho to get married. And if mothers could have wet dreams, let me tell you: Girls, this guy was it. The perfect mail-order groom.

He was good-looking, reliable, smart, financially secure. He was faithful, didn't drink, and actually liked going home to visit his mother each month. He wanted children and a house in the suburbs. He doted on me. He even liked doing laundry.

Yet, surprisingly, when he told me that he wanted to "start shopping for a ring," I felt none of the euphoria I'd always dreamed of. Instead, I felt a blood-freezing panic.

Because, while this guy was definitely a "catch," he wasn't the right catch for me. Really, I needed a far more idiosyncratic fish.

I mean, I'm my grandmother's granddaughter-and in her day, my grandmother's idea of a great catch was a Communist nymphomaniac who looked like Errol Flynn. As her prodigy, I wasn't crazy about spending every other weekend with in-laws in Cleveland and living a staid, traditional family life. Since I grew up in New York City-where you never learn to drive and therefore view all cars as a source of vehicular manslaughter-the mere idea of car-pooling kids around in a minivan made me apoplectic. And while I approached the world as a hysterical, all-you-can-eat buffet, this guy literally ate seven foods. The day he tried a scallop, it was such a big deal, you'd think he'd donated a kidney.

Our fundamental values were vastly different, our dreams were vastly different, and we couldn't negotiate any compromise.

So, difficult as it was, I told my boyfriend not to buy the ring. Me, the one with the doily on her head! (Interestingly enough, most of our friends a.s.sumed that he was the commitment-o-phobe.) But it became clear to both of us that it's not enough to marry a list of qualities-a person who looks good on paper or seems like the "type" we're "supposed" to marry. In making a lifelong commitment to someone, we also commit to a Life. Better make sure we share the same vision.

4. Go slow. Funnily enough, the next guy who proposed to me was the complete opposite: a gorgeous actor-turned-gourmet chef who had businesses in Hawaii and New York. "We can spend half our time in Maui, half in Manhattan," he promised. "I can support you while you write your feminist discourse. We'll travel the world together. We'll see the great operas, eat at the greatest restaurants, and you'll have as much excitement as you've ever dreamed of!"

Sounded great.

There was only one problem.

We'd been on exactly two dates.

When I pointed out that we barely knew each other, he cried, "So what? Take a chance! Trust me, you'll love it!"-as if marrying him was akin to taking a quick spin in a Ferrari.

Now, romance is almost, by definition, supposed to be a thing of great speed and spontaneity: a "rush," a "whirlwind" that "sweeps us off our feet" and "carries us away."

But who the f.u.c.k has ever really enjoyed being hit by a tornado? And who the h.e.l.l can think rationally in the middle of one?

If we meet a great guy (or gal), we've got to take the time to really get to know each other and grow together-expecially if we're young.

Says my friend Dale, thirty-two, who's just gotten divorced after ten years, "When you're twenty-one, you have no idea how much you're going to grow and change in the next ten years."

Need proof? Just check out the hairdos in your high-school yearbook.

5. Keepin' it real. Is there anybody, among all our friends, relatives, siblings, roommates, co-workers, teachers, and lovers whom we could honestly be with 24/7 for the next fifty-eight years, who would not, on occasion, annoy the h.e.l.l out of us?

Besides, for some people, finding a partner is not a matter of locking eyes with a stranger across a dance floor, but real estate: Location, location, location is everything. It's a matter of where they are in their lives, where they are in their heads, and where they both want to take things after they meet.

6. Marriage ain't for everyone. As Mae West once put it, "Marriage is a great inst.i.tution. But I'm not ready for an inst.i.tution yet."

7. And, finally, this advice from the marrieds...

a Try to find in-laws who live in Tibet. Better yet, marry an orphan.

a Only register for gifts at stores that will give you cash back.

a Don't build a marriage solely on s.e.xual chemistry. Sure, fireworks are spectacular, but look what happens to them. Fifteen seconds and poof!

a Whether you hit city hall or rent out the Ritz, plan your nuptials together. Frankly, any couple that can survive planning a wedding really deserves to be together for the rest of their lives.

Chapter 12.

So What's Wrong with a Little Lesbian Wedding?

Saleslady at David's Bridal: "So which one of you is the bride?"

Diane and Theresa: "We both are."

In an ideal world, of course, I wouldn't have to write this chapter. Unfortunately, we're a country that adores "Jerry Springer" and taking children to gun shows, but thinks that allowing gay people to build a life together is perverted. Go figure.

Anyway...