1. Celebrate the holiday, whether you’re in the perfect relationship, a so-so relationship, or no relationship. Wear red, go out and have fun, and eat a piece of your favorite vegan chocolate.
2. Appreciate every relationship in your life: your romantic partner (or the one who’s on his/her way), your parents and children and siblings and extended family, and your friends who are like family you picked yourself.
3. Be a romantic. Take a candlelit bubble bath. Read The Time Traveler’s Wife or a Jane Austen novel. Make a Valentine for your truelove or your grandchild. Watch a movie like When Harry Met Sally or Moonstruck. Read the “Add a Little Romance” essay in Creating a Charmed Life.
4. Enjoy your body, whether someone else will be enjoying it today or not. Buy yourself some perfume or some lovely something from the lingerie shop (sorry, guys: a few of these suggestions are gender-specific). Get a massage or simply indulge your winter-dry skin in a long, lotion-lathering or in abdyanga, the Ayurvedic warm-oil massage. Put fresh sheets on the bed, some lavender oil on the pillow, and snuggle up with your sweetie or your thoughts.
5. Give some love to the world at large. Find some pain and make it go away. A Valentine-specific project that has my heart each year is from www.dogsdeservebetter.org. This group is dedicated to educating people that dogs deserve better than to be chained or crated outside. They need a home and a family and attention, and they give back so much more than that. If you go to their site, you can help support their “Send a Valentine to a Chained Dog” project (and if you’re not reading this till after Valentine’s Day, it’s not too late to help).
6. Clear space for what you want to enter – whether that’s a love interest, a better job, more money, less fear. Spend a day this weekend or next clearing out drawers and closets (somebody actually wants your junk), cleaning the cobwebs and dust bunnies from beneath the heavy furniture, and getting a head start on spring cleaning. By the time spring gets here, you’ll have far better things to do than clean!
7. Remember that you are dearly loved. You are made from love and the Great Mystery that created you loves you more than you could imagine. Whatever your relationship status at this moment (or job status or pants size or net worth or anything else, for that matter), you are involved in greatest love affair going. Experience it by cherishing yourself, listening to the Inner Voice, and falling in love with God more and more every day.