7 Reasons Valentine’s Day is Completely Made Up

Ain’t love grand?

Yes. That is, provided it isn’t enforced on one day of the year and shoved down everyone’s throat.

Call me bitter, call me jealous, call me whatever you want. Just don’t call me your ‘Valentine’. While I’m all for being lavished with gifts and given the romantic treatment, who says we need to dedicate an actual day to it?

Despite us all secretly suspecting that this festival of flattery is complete BS, we still perpetuate the tradition by buying heart-shaped chocolates and overblown or unoriginal gifts every February 14.

So let’s love one each other all year round and agree that Valentine’s Day is the absolute worst.

It makes a ceremony out of things you should already be doing in a committed relationship.
If you’re not telling your significant other they’re lovely every day, you should have been dumped long ago. So let’s not give them one day to make up for 364 days of inadequate boy/girlfriending. If you still do regular date nights, you won’t miss the annual February 14 fanfare. And if you need to be reminded to book a crowded restaurant with a prix fixe menu once annually, isn’t that what anniversaries are for?

It falls conveniently into a period of commercial neglect.
Shortly after Christmas and New Year, and just a month or two before Easter, sits Valentine’s Day – a thoroughly depressing and opportune little celebration. Heaven forbid we should all stay indoors and binge watch Netflix for the entire month of February when we could be out there spending all the money we’ve saved during sober January.

You don’t get the day off work.
Like all good double standards, I accept hush-money in the form of statutory public holidays. So while I may not believe in Jesus Christ Our Saviour per se, nothing softens my dislike for fictional holidays like a four-day weekend. Get into it, V-day.

It’s alienating.
Have a friend who’s going to be alone for the holidays? Ask them over for Christmas dinner. Know a single pal who doesn’t have a significant other this Valentine’s Day? Yeah, perhaps don’t invite them around to watch the pair of you fornicate. My point being, this limited ‘holiday’ is one of celebration for just half of the population, eliciting ‘joy’ (if that’s what you call last-minute panic-buying of a card and flowers from the gas station) to only a select few.

Teddy

Smug coupledom is reward itself.
If anything, we need a day off from love – not a day dedicated to it – which thanks to social media is already celebrated 365 days of the year. Another bae-day is the last thing single people or non-smug couples want to see in overdrive this February 14.

Its historical truth is a far-cry from Hallmark.
Starting out as a feast day of a Christian saint, St. Valentine’s Day did not have any link to love and romance until the 14th century when Chaucer wrote a poem about it, twisting its historical basis beyond recognition. Sure, we don’t exactly crowd around a manger come December 25, but in fairness gold, frankincense and myrrh were probably the PS4s, iPhones and Beats headphones of the day.                           

Everybody suffers.
Think you’re unlucky to be single on Valentine’s? What about if you’re actually in a relationship? This is not a day to sit back, enjoy, and ponder over your achievements as a couple. If you’re committed it raises questions of ‘where is this going?’ or ‘how can you top last year?’ And if your relationship is shaky, it’s an appalling time to breakup and terrible era in which to be gift-giving. Awkward.

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