My husband and I have been married for 27 years, and for most of that time we have lived on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood. All but one of our four kids flew the SoCo coop to L.A., where they struggle to find their feet, slogging through the existential goo of late capitalism, creative saturation and infrastructure decay to eek out a living among the masses as musicians and artists. Life has become for them, like many millennials and Gen Z-ers, an exhausting grind of self-curation; day by day, the tinsel tarnishes.

Few of their friends are in relationships, either because they haven’t met someone or can’t afford to date. I have little in the way of advice for them. After all, I came of age during the Cold War, an early arrival of Gen X. The year I went to college we still had a rotary-dial phone and rabbit ears on our TV set. Gas was 62 cents a gallon.

To understand the romantic zeitgeist of my teenage years, one need not look further than ABC’s 1982 hallucinatory synth-pop video “Look of Love” in which lead-singer Martin Fry, dressed like Harold Hill in heavy eyeliner, beckons two hand-clapping, lederhosen-clad party boys towards him as he holds a Hasselblad camera in his hands singing, “When the world is full of strange arrangements, and gravity can’t hold you down.”

Alas, I have now reached the age when Valentine’s Day is best celebrated with boxed cheesecake, a fork and Monty Don’s Great British Garden Revival. Nothing says romance like watching a Cambridge-educated gardener sow the runner beans and brew a homemade plant tonic from fermented nettle and comfrey, making the occasional guest appearance at some rural allotment to advise on cabbage white fly and powdery mildew.

All my husband and I ask of each other on Valentine’s Day is that we agree to ignore it. Romance is in the small daily acts of reciprocity—instead of long-stem roses, the gift of blooming Manzanita and quince on a winter walk, our rescue dogs, our chickens, the appreciation of another year on the good green Earth before it becomes Venus.

Admittedly, navigating romance in the 21st century requires a new set of skills, and I still have an iPhone 4. I tell my kids to cultivate their interests, to get outside and off-screen as much as possible and that love, like gardens, is cultivated from understanding, care and by nurturing the soil that sustains it. They tell me that I have no idea what I’m talking about, that gardening metaphors are both ridiculous and irrelevant for a generation of people priced out of both gardens and housing, and they’re #vanlife right.

The rules have all changed—marriage is out, gender fluidity and polyamory is in. Some argue that marriage is and has always been an economic arrangement, one intended to preserve an imbalance of power and autonomy between the sexes based on the historic fact that men would be the economic engine of the marriage and women the caretakers of the domestic sphere.

Welcome to the future.

In her book Against Love: A Polemic, provocateur-essayist Laura Kipnis writes, “We live in sexually interesting times, meaning a culture which manages to be simultaneously hypersexualized and to retain its Puritan underpinnings, in precisely equal proportions.”

The Atlantic and the Washington Post ran articles in recent years citing studies about how Americans are having less sex, a trend mostly driven by younger generations. In the age of SnapChat, fears about exposure during and after intimacy, the illusory online “you,” 24/7 availability through cell phones, and the proliferation of Internet predators, are really real. Yet love finds a way—even in February.

There are those who can and do offer professional relationship advice for singles, couples and throuples for navigating Valentine’s Day—for better or for worse.

For singles seeking connection, Alexis, from Tinder Plus, says to promote the “authentic version of yourself. If you pretend to be someone you’re not, you’ll attract someone who falls in love with the false version of you. Don’t be so afraid of rejection that you fake who you are.”

No news here. But in the age of a digital persona, even the authentic version of oneself is highly edited, enhanced and if we’re honest with ourselves, a little dishonest to others.

“Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be just about romantic relationships,” says Viktor, a relationship expert for the website SocialPro. “Celebrate other important relationships by doing something enjoyable with those close to you. Surprise and variation are important ingredients in any healthy relationship.”

Be creative. Care about something bigger. Romance isn’t just for those with disposable incomes, and it costs nothing to spread the love.

“Saying and doing small, simple expressions of gratitude every day yields big rewards,” Alexis writes. “When people feel recognized as special and appreciated, they’re happier in that relationship and more motivated to make the relationship better and stronger.”

“The number one thing that I teach couples who want a sustaining, nourishing relationship is to regularly set time aside to do a ‘commitment ceremony,'” writes Marie from Marie Anna Winter Coaching. “Every deep relationship that we have deserves and needs attention and care, and a celebration of our commitment to the relationship.”

“Remember, practice always makes perfect,” Alexis says, about multiple-partner relationships. “The latter means that for you to be successful in this fetish, you will not only need to research but also have to ensure that you are willing to practice.”

Boundaries, she says, define the limits and potential of a threesome.

“In my experience, the biggest challenge of people in throuples and less-normative relationships is an underlying fear of not being accepted by those around them,” she says. “This is true for most people who decide to live outside the societal norm—especially during times like Valentine’s Day. It’s important to understand that we create our happiness not by adhering to expectations but by living our lives just like we want to.”

Rilke wrote that, “the highest task of a bond between two people: [is] that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.”

Maybe Valentine’s Day, despite its largely forgotten historic origins and the tacky modern commercial hype, is a reminder that a warm, life-giving force stirs beneath the surface during the month of suicides. Perhaps it is a reminder to expand the human heart at the very moment when the bleakness seems eternal.

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Citing a lack of city support and foot traffic, Gerard Nebesky ended an 18-month run of daily restaurant service at his 4th Street restaurant, Gerard’s Paella Y Tapas, on Monday, Feb. 3.

“It just breaks my heart to make this decision,” Nebesky said, of the closure. “People love our food but there is just not enough of them in this part of town. The beautiful thing about a restaurant is that it enables you to meet a community—and that part of this project has been a total success!”

Luckily for Nebesky—and his fans—he’ll still get plenty of opportunities to serve up his paella, a saffron-infused rice dish of Spanish origin, throughout the North Bay. Nebesky plans to reopen the restaurant intermittently for special events, including Sonoma County Restaurant Week between Feb. 21 and March 1.

Sheriff Responds

The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office has responded to a community advisory group’s calls for changes to the law enforcement agency’s Use of Force policies. The answer? In short, the agency says its current policies are compliant with current case law and adequate to protect the public and law enforcement officers.

It all started in December, when a group of community members serving as members of the Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review and Outreach Community Advisory Committee (CAC) formally submitted a lengthy document recommending changes to the Sheriff’s policies for dealing with—or hopefully avoiding all together—potentially dangerous situations.

The Sheriff’s Office responded to CAC’s 20 recommendations in a four-page letter.

Many of the Sheriff’s responses—all brief—cite the agency’s compliance with current standards set by laws and legal precedent as a reason not to pursue the recommendations. Other responses indicate that the Sheriff’s Office considers its current policies adequate.

In response to questions about the use of the Carotid Hold, a neck restraint banned by some law-enforcement agencies, and Tasers, the Sheriff’s Office cited the need for more data and possible alternatives if they decide to end the use of either method. IOLERO’s director, Karlene Navarro, has said she is gathering additional data about the use of Carotid Holds.

Former CAC members who worked on the recommendations have voiced frustration that the Sheriff’s Office did not communicate with CAC while it was working on its recommendations. The CAC members also say they spoke to other law enforcement agencies while crafting the Use of Force recommendations in order to understand what was feasible.

Sonoma County residents don’t appreciate the scale of a crime happening all around them, despite an increased effort at public outreach over the past decade, according to a local nonprofit director.

“Human trafficking happens every single day in Sonoma County,” says Christine Castillo, the executive director of Verity, a Sonoma County nonprofit that offers services and support to trafficking victims and sometimes coordinates with law-enforcement agencies conducting enforcement operations.

Human trafficking, which requires the use of force, fraud or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act, is a multibillion-dollar international industry. The worldwide problem is far more prevalent locally than most Sonoma County residents realize, Castillo says.

“Many people in our county just don’t understand. Many people think it’s a foreign problem, that it’s ‘over there,'” Castillo, who has worked at Verity for 13 years, says.

Due to the nature of the crime, it tends to be more difficult to enforce than drug dealing, the largest category of international crime.

While drug dealers are often caught holding hard evidence, human-trafficking victims may be coerced or threatened into telling law-enforcement officers that they are with their trafficker willingly, Castillo says.

But, despite the lack of general recognition—or maybe because of it—the human-trafficking industry is booming across the country, Castillo says.

As a result, government agencies and nonprofits are partnering to spread awareness about the issue.

In 2012, President Barrack Obama designated January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Awareness Month. Each year, nonprofits and government agencies attempt to draw attention to the scale of human trafficking—and the resources available to victims—with press releases, advertisements and billboards.

Last week, multiple North Bay law-enforcement agencies announced recent programs targeting human-trafficking operations.

The Santa Rosa Police Department partnered with Homeland Security Investigations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Petaluma Police Department, the Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety, the Healdsburg Police Department, Sonoma County Probation and VERITY, a nonprofit focused on human trafficking.

All told, the detectives contacted six women victims and arrested two men—one suspected of trafficking, the other of aiding and abetting the effort.

In their operation, the Santa Rosa Police Department attempted to offer support services to all of the victims, according to a press release.

In 2018, the National Human Trafficking Hotline received 1,656 reports of human trafficking in California. The vast majority of the cases—1,226 of the total—were for sex trafficking; 169 cases involved unspecified kinds of trafficking; and 151 cases involved labor.

In 2017, the national hotline recived notification of 6,244 cases of sex trafficking, a 13 percent jump from 2016.

County-level data is more difficult to come by. Arrest rates by law enforcement offer a hint but don’t offer the full picture since a large amount of trafficking goes undetected.

The Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office pursued 200 human-trafficking cases between 2011 and 2018.

In January 2019, the courts sentenced David Romesburg, a Rohnert Park man, and his mother for running a prostitution ring involving dozens of women over a period of 10 years, according to prosecutors.

“It is fitting that today’s sentence was handed down during Human Trafficking Awareness Month,” Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch said in a statement at the time. “The problem of sex trafficking is not exclusive to (the) Third World and large urban settings. It can and does happen in this community.”

In addition to supporting the increased attention and resources allocated towards solving the problem, Castillo and other advocates also support changes in the language used to describe trafficking operations—and the people law-enforcement agencies target.

For instance, Castillo says urges law-enforcement agencies not to arrest or ticket trafficking victims.

“What’s the point?” Castillo says.

Victims likely won’t be able to pay the fine or show up for a court date, she points out. Instead, law enforcement should target traffickers and offer support to victims. Local agencies are moving in this direction, she says.

In the Santa Rosa operation last week, the six trafficking victims were not cited, according to the police department’s press release.

Local goups coordinate their efforts through the Sonoma County Human Trafficking Task Force (SCHTTF), a group of which meets monthly and attempts to coordinate law-enforcement efforts with recovery-service providers.

When Super Bowl 50 came to San Francisco in 2016, law enforcement increased its efforts, anticipating an increase in prostitution as fans flooded into the Bay Area ahead of the big game.

This trend happens like clockwork every year, no matter where the Super Bowl takes place. Last year, when the game was held in Atlanta, government agencies ramped up enforcement and outreach efforts, although they acknowledged that trafficking was a year-round problem.

However, there is no evidence to support the media-fueled idea that trafficking increases significantly with big sports events like the Super Bowl, representatives of the Polaris Project and International Human Trafficking Institute told CNN last February.

The slight uptick in calls to the Trafficking Hotline is in part due to the fact that nonprofits and law-enforcement agencies tend to increase their outreach efforts during large events, including the Super Bowl.

In fact, trafficking happens throughout the country all year round, FBI spokesperson Kevin Rowson told CNN last February.

“The problem exists not just at major sporting events but throughout the year in communities all around the country,” Rowson said.