Galentine’s Day – Let’s get ‘womantic’!
I’m a sucker for romance. Flowers, love poems, naked tango in the moonlight? Bring it on, and don’t forget the oysters! At the same time, I believe that love comes in all shapes, sizes and colors. So, isn’t it a little strange that for the longest time, we have been celebrating traditional boy-meets-girl partnerships as the only valuable expression of love, especially around Valentine’s Day?
For the ancient Greeks, friendship was every bit as passionate and important as romantic-sexual love. Aristotle even described friends as our ‘second selves’. I like that! The love I share with my female friends – let’s call it ‘womance’ – completes me. It is one of the greatest joys in my life. We laugh and cry together. We fix each other’s crowns and bra straps. We guide each other through transitions, from marriage to menopause. We analyze each other’s astrological charts for hours over liters of green tea. We share the fears and joys of motherhood, the challenges of succeeding in a man’s world, the exhilarating roller coaster of life. Oh, and we talk about sex. A lot.
This supportive, uplifting and empowering love was exactly what inspired me to start marlies|dekkers. Realizing how much of my strength, courage and happiness came from the unbreakable bonds with the women in my life, I wanted to spread that love through my lingerie and my mission. They say love is friendship set on fire. For 30 years now, I’ve been using that fire to ignite the souls of women all over the world. Daring them to dream, to grow and to be, I have been giving them the courage to GO for it. And I watched them pass on that fire, across several generations. Gal power at its best.
That’s why I LOVE the idea of Galentine’s Day: a celebration of feminism and female friendship. A day filled with gal-pal fun. An excuse to put on your favorite lingerie and serve some fiercely feminine looks. Anything goes; a boozy brunch, a women-only bootcamp, a bikini fitting at one of my shops (bites and bubbles on me!). Taking place on February 13, beating Valentine’s Day by a day – who said women aren’t competitive? – Galentine’s shows the world that female friendship can be just as powerful and passionate as traditional lovey-dovey relationships. And it gives us a glimpse of a beautiful world where women have broken the cycle of female rivalry and finally joined forces. How womantic is that?
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