Valentine's Reimagined: The Shared Table.

This week, most calls to most restaurants on planet earth, will involve a simple request. "Could you do a table for 2 please".. From posh hotels to the corner curry house the world over, staff have already begun a giant redesign. A choreography of furniture configuration to suit that once-a-year waltz of Valentine’s Day, when the world re-arranges itself, into dining halls made for two.

Firstly, I am not setting out to undermine the feast and fest of St Valentine. I am simply taking a peek, not a swipe, and perhaps offering a tweak to our annual, cultural lecture on L.O.V.E.

On this day, and perhaps on most days, love is private, and inward-facing. We become pleasantly candlelit and very cozy. There is nothing wrong with that. Turning toward one person with intention and care is a beautiful thing. Romance deserves space and it merits a singular focus. Where my itchy pause begins, is not that Valentine's Day celebrates love - it's perhaps that it now wholly defines it.

What if, just for a moment, we imagined Valentine’s Day differently? What if this February fondness wasn’t quite so binary? What if intimacy wasn’t confined to pairs, but practiced in shared space? A big, long, beautiful table, set not for two, but forty two. Oh...the hushed discomfort of that idea..

The very concept seems a bit medieval.. it might make some of us experience soul cramps. Fair enough. Let's lean into that a little bit. That is where good journeys begin...Why do we feel so uncomfortable? Does it feel awkward? Exposing? Unromantic? I mean the reaction - whatever it is - is already revealing and pretty interesting...

At a table for two, we retain control. We have (almost) certainly pre-selected our companion. We are very familiar with the rhythm of the evening and the arena of the interaction. At a shared table, that certainty can quite suddenly, just dissolve. We don’t know who will sit beside us, to what extent they might disrupt the planned perfection of our romantic interlude, or well, anything. That combo of unknowns is just plain unsettling, particularly with the well-wrapped, ribboned box of Valentines night.

Communal eating introduces that uncertainty. There was a time where I would personally shudder at the mere thought of it. "What do you think I am? A freaking Viking?.." And yet the uncertainty asks something of us. It asks us to lower the drawbridge and snuggle up to our unease. Shared tables reduce our usual buffers around personal space. I think with the ceremony of Valentines Day, a big worry is that our affections and our deeply caring conversation spills over the rim of the wine glass. If I say "I love you soooo much", someone is going to hear. And to quote Hamlet himself - "Ay, there's the rub."

Underneath that layer of love's little onion, sits that quieter concern: the idea that intimacy, when shared or overheard, somehow loses its value. It gets embarrassing..we are a little vulnerable - and we still consider that a position of weakness, when it could not be further from what weakness really is. Does an expression of love need to be whispered to be meaningful? Does romantic depth require such table-for-two privacy? I mean look at weddings - the other massive expression of love that we all celebrate.. Can you imagine a bride & groom situation where the tent is set with a table for two?

What’s striking is that communal eating isn’t new. It’s ancient. For all of human history, people ate together by default. Families, villages, monasteries, celebrations, funerals - all organised around the long table. Feasting together was how we gathered, how we marked the milestone moments - how we belonged. Eating in carefully curated pairs, would just have looked.. weird.

Valentine’s Day may be a bit of a cultural invention, quietly sponsored by the likes of Hallmark Cards, but shared tables are a roundly human one. When we eat together, something subtle happens. We slow down. Our focus widens - not cheapens. We pass plates. We listen. You might be reading this is horror.. but bear with me here. Shared meals don't negate expressions of love and intimacy, they create the conditions for it.

And what about the people who are "between Valentines" - the ones who have not quite figured it out yet, or the ones who have lost the person they loved most in the world? Those who have forgotten more about love, than we will ever know.. Do we just leave them out? Do they not deserve a place at our table of tenderness? Do they just not qualify?

I have two dear friends that are both Chefs. I love them. They make food because that is one of the ways they express love. Food equalizes. Everyone eats. Everyone has needs. Everyone reaches out and everyone is held at the long table. To share a table is to say, however briefly, you belong here too.

Reimagining Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean waking up and suddenly telling your partner you don't like the way they chew. It doesn't mean we abandon romance. It could mean we choose to slightly widen the definition and the expression of intimate affection. Love doesn’t disappear at the long table. It simply takes its place with love, among other forms of connection — friendship, kinship, gratitude and shared humanity.

Maybe Valentine’s Day could honour not only the love we choose privately, but the love we practice collectively. The kind that reminds us love is not a finite or a scarce resource. It is not a rare earth element and it is definitely not Pie. We could choose to consider that connection doesn’t weaken when it is shared. Affection and belonging are not on opposite sides of the great River Love.

Maybe love doesn’t always need a table for two. Maybe sometimes it needs a long bench, a shared table, and the willingness to respond to the ultimate question from hell.. "So...how did you two meet?"...

See you at the long table.