I hate Valentine’s Day. Truly, truly loathe it. I’ve said it, it’s out there, and I expect I’ll take some flak for it. But I’m going to explain to you why, and hopefully you won’t judge me so harshly by the end of this piece.
I know what some people who read this might be thinking. They’ll be thinking “You just hate Valentine’s Day because you’re single.” Well, that certainly doesn’t help, does it? No, being alone on Valentine’s Day can be a really unpleasant experience. From the point of view of the terminal singleton – like myself – you already succumb to the feeling that everyone else in the world is forcing their happinness down your throat, that you’re doomed to walk the Earth alone while everyone else stares and thinks “Finding someone is so easy, why hasn’t he/she done it too?” That feeling is magnified to dizzying heights around VD. You cannot walk around a corner, it seems, without some ad campaign blurting out another great idea how to spoil your special someone on February 14th, or some rom-com coming out dedicated to showing you explicitly how everybody else’s lovelife happens, and yours does not.
Worst of all, without doubt, is Facebook. Now, in fairness, even at the best of times Facebook can feel like the world’s biggest competition to make your life look better than everyone else’s, but Valentine’s Day in particular becomes a gratuitous display of “look how much my other half loves me!” It makes the other 364 days of the year pale in comparison to how outright sucky it feels to not HAVE someone to spoil or make feel special. I know not every coupled-up person feels the need to broadcast how fabulous their relationship is, and from personal experience (warning : hypocrite alert) while the four VDs I spent with my last ex, I did in fact make a lot of effort and spend a lot of money to make the day as special as I could for her, I took great delight in putting none of it on Facebook. I was too busy living the moments to take pictures of the flowers or the meals or the wine, and to be frank those moments were for US, and I didn’t consider them anybody else’s damn business.
Me on Valentine’s Just kidding… it’s every day.
But finally, my biggest problem with Valentine’s Day as a concept, is that it actually fundamentally flies in the face of my idea of romance. Romance to me is about spontaneity, creativity and imagination. The unexpected things you do, the joyous surprises. I can think of nothing less romantic than an arbitrarily selected day where you are expected to go out of your way to prove how much you love your partner, as if the other 364 days a year are any less important to let somebody know how special they are. For me, romance is things like turning up unexpectedly as she finishes her shift to take her out for a meal without warning, taking a day off unannounced so you can spend a day together for a change, buying that dress she pointed out two weeks ago or coming home with flowers JUST BECAUSE. Not spending wildly on the same day every year just because every other fucker does it too.
So there you go, that’s why I hate Valentine’s. Yes, I am a hypocrite. When I was in a couple, despite being told “I don’t want you to make a big deal of Valentine’s” I always managed to do exactly that, because despite the warning, no guy wants to be the guy that doesn’t do anything on Valentine’s Day. And therein lies the problem.
Pastries And Cakes 