Look at that. We all lived through Valentine’s Day.
According to a ton of people in my social media feeds, Valentine’s Day sits in a range somewhere between “annoying corporate holiday” and “candy heart murder-suicide pact day”. V-Day has always carried a stigma for the average adult male: it’s either the day you go try to get laid or the day you fuck everything up and will never get laid again. Somewhere along the line, though, it became this hated thing, perceived not as a day to celebrate love but a day for those in relationships to throw their connectedness in the face of all of their untethered friends.
I’ll admit: Valentine’s day is pretty superfluous. If you’re in even a semi-committed relationship, you don’t need a holiday – or any outside force, for that matter – to reinforce that bond. Well, you shouldn’t, at least. Your relationship with your significant other is a very personal thing, and isn’t something that most people (at least that I know) need or want to celebrate on an international level. We want our celebrations to be just for us – the times that our relationship not only takes precedence over the rest of the world, but does so to the exclusion of all others.
So, yeah. Valentine’s Day is somewhat artificial. But when did it become the target of vitriol? When I was growing up there was always some bitter sap on the sidelines with their fuck-this-lovey-dovey-crap attitude, but somehow this cheesy, unimportant holiday has become THE ESTABLISHMENT, and single people turn into a raging anti-establishment mob for a few days.
I’ll let all you single people know a little secret about Valentine’s Day: most of us in relationships don’t give a shit about it. Yeah, we’ll use it as a random excuse to buy flowers or go out to a movie or have a date night – all things that we do in plenty of other situations – but it’s not us that’s throwing anything in anyone’s face. Truly committed, happy couples think that Valentine’s Day is pretty silly and arbitrary, just like you single folk do.
The percentage of people who go googly over this holiday is (almost certainly) pretty (probably) small (hopefully). The real pressure of Valentine’s Day lands squarely on the shoulders of newly-committed guys whose relationships haven’t developed enough to have their own milestones, and thus V-Day becomes girlfriends’ litmus test for their boyfriends’ devotion. And let me tell ya: that is a shitty place to be.
