For years now I've been using this blog to whinge, moan, grumble, and bitterly complain that Valentine’s Day is a bullshit, vastly profitable holiday marketed by Hallmark to give you an excuse to stuff your face with chocolate and spend all your money on useless flowers and shitty jewellery. It’s the worst day of the year and pedestrians eat that shit up.
Whereas on New Year’s Eve or Santa Con you can man tequila to the face to get through the occasion, Valentine’s Day is all about moderation. It’s a romantic glass of red wine and slow, weak and emotional rodgering - because that’s love, of course - and you may have realized by now that I give zero f*cks.
There are a lot of good reasons to give Valentine’s Day the side-eye. It’s a holiday, as many people dutifully point out every year, that’s more about selling candies, cards and jewellery than it is about love.
You might have figured this was coming your way, since we like to boycott all pedestrian holidays, but this one is at the top of our hit lists for a variety of reasons. Firstly, if you are “lucky” enough to be sustaining an enjoyable relationship, you shouldn’t subscribe to an arbitrary occasion in order to display your love and passion. Valentine’s Day is an excuse for a terrible boyfriend or girlfriend to act extra nice one day of the year to make up for all the bits on the side.
There’s a wild misconception that these lovers, because they went above and beyond on Valentine’s Day, are actually perfect. Even if the next day they’re still the same assholes. Heading into any old drug store and picking up a generic teddy bear or an atrocious frilly heart filled with chocolates isn’t an expression of genuine love. If you truly care about someone, then one god-awful day of the year isn’t the only time you show it.
Alas, the holiday is only worsened because the expectation falls on the guy’s side. This is our time to impress our girlfriends, lovers or steady booty calls. It’s a girl’s second birthday as they are lavished with presents, fancy dinners and flowers, and even the occasional eat out. Christmas just came early. It transforms us into Prince Charming for the day because society pressures us into believing this is the only right thing to do.
Why is it that we don’t get chocolates? Why can’t our girl impress us? It’s not as if she’s girlfriend of the year either. Sorry, but I’m an alpha male, if this holiday means I have to be a bitch for a day just because love is in the air - I ain’t about that kind of life.
Because the one insurmountable problem of all these plans is that they depend on women actually giving a shit about what these guys do. And as most of these guys in their hearts probably realize, no one really cares if they eat a nice steak dinner (go for it, dudes) or waste their evening giving “chick flicks” one-star ratings on Netflix (knock yourselves out).
If they were decent human beings, being ignored by them actually would hurt. Of course, if they were decent human beings, they wouldn’t be giddily fantasizing about ostracizing the women of the world for being women.
Aside from the fact that this “holiday” forces people to mime a feeling they probably don’t have, it’s derived from a materialist effort to symbolize hackneyed displays of love. Even Jennifer Lopez herself once said love shouldn’t cost a thing, this world is expensive enough as it is, but this occasion has become a gold digger’s wet dream; the quality of her man and his feelings is dependent on how much he spent on her. We’ve prefaced love with a dollar sign.
We carried around your flowers all day, dealt with your endless chocolate binge, and thoughtfully ripped some R-Kelly lyrics for a heartfelt card. Guys only pretend to care on Valentine’s Day in the hope of an uninspiring blowjob or a rhythm-less hump at the day’s end. Other than that we could care less when the next day we wake up and everything is the same – aside from the dent in our bank accounts.
It’s an artificial, rootless holiday with a backbone it pretends is love, but is really money. Just like love in itself, it’s all feigned. The truth is that we’re all cursed with the binding construct of monogamy. Sure we’ve all felt love early on, but we soon realized the façade doesn’t last. Valentine's Day is a holiday of negative space, something we wish we could spend with someone else or no one at all. Fidelity is impossible, we don’t know love, so it’s just easier to pretend the one day of the year.
Valentine’s Day is a confusing mess for most people. We live in a deconstructed society filled with diluted boundaries and no labels. We don’t have titles and we fear calling anyone our girlfriend’s because of the walls we build around ourselves. Valentine’s Day is that roadblock, the day that begs us to define to the steady booty what we think of them.
Either a steady realizes it’s nothing real, because we’re spending the day with another girl; or she looks at it as an opportunity to bump up the status from just casual sex and complicates things; or the girl assumes any effort makes her your girlfriend. It’s a nightmare any way you look at it. It makes everyone reconsider what they want from the arrangement: more or less. And there’s nothing worse than seeing an ex you hate enjoy the occasion more than you.
It’s a day that causes stress for a lot of couples and resentment amongst the single. And those little chalky heart candies with the words on them, whatever their kitschy charm, are really kind of crappy as candy.
If you do really love someone, and are lucky enough to be with someone you enjoy beyond sex, then you should do nice things for him or her all the time and show that you care - not just one day out of the year. Failing that, dig out your copy of Hot Fuzz, grab yourself a Cornetto and celebrate Simon Pegg's birthday instead.
At least it's cheaper.