Looking for Love in a Leap Year

This is the first in our series for Valentine’s Day. You’ll find articles on finding love for Valentine’s Day. Later in the week there’ll be articles on buying that perfect  Valentine’s Gift, and even buying Valentine’s Gifts on a Budget. So watch out for the latest news for Valentine’s Day.

Sometimes 365 day in a year just doesn’t seem like enough time to finally get around to meeting that someone special. Subtract work and family commitments, the time spent compulsively watching episodes of Storage Wars (which has grown substantially with the premiere of Storage Wars: Texas and soon to air Storage Wars: New York), the weekends spent attending other people’s weddings, the hours spent stalking your ex on Facebook, and the amount of time you spend hanging out with other single friends complaining about being single (and, of course, exchanging opinions about the latest episode of Storage Wars, gotta love Barry), and you’re left with roughly 6 day, 14 hours, and 12 minutes (damn you A&E!) in the year.

Fortunately for the forlorn looking for love, 2012 offers one additional day from them to experience their own “meet cute,” to agree to go on one more blind date, convince themselves that a second cousin is far enough down the family tree that one date couldn’t hurt, and to spend a little extra time voyeuristically scanning through eerily similar OkCupid profiles. (Not sure what I’m doing on this site, looking for someone with a sense of humor, I like things that I hope make me seem interesting and only a little pretentious, rinse, repeat, reload, refresh.)

Historically, a leap year held the tradition of being one of the few times a woman could actually propose marriage to a man. A 1606 book titled Courtship, Love and Matrimonie stated that any man who would be so daring as to deny a woman his hand in marriage when asked during a leap year would forego the privilege of attending church. A hefty fine considering the average peasant’s life in the 17th century consisted of a daily routine of toil, sustenance, sleep, and church. To drive the point home with a rhyme, a quote attributed to Chaucer states, “In Leap Year they have power to chuse, the men no charter to refuse.”

While asking a man you just met to marry you might seem like a good idea if you’re a Kardashian, most mothers would tell their daughters to always be wary of marrying any man without first seeing what he keeps in his basement. By the same token, meeting a woman who carries her own engagement ring around waiting to pop the question to the first eligible, or at the very least breathing, bachelor they find can give even the most hopelessly romantic fella a moments pause.

Sadly, such traditions have long lost their sway in our prim and proper world where arranged marriages have been eschewed in exchange for actually getting to know and love a potential mate, and dowries are paid in how many miles away the in-laws live rather than livestock.  Finding love in a leap year, just like in any other, requires a willingness to stay ever positive, to always say yes cause you just never know, and stop wondering why, if, and when. For those of us who have still yet to meet “the one,” 2012 offers one more day, 24 additional hours of hope and promise, and the potential that 366 could be our lucky number.
Dating Symbol’s guest author today is Timothy Lemke, a freelance writer living in Portland, who has taken more than one date to B.J. Willy’s for the best pizza in West Linn.