When people say, “I hate Valentine’s Day,” what they often mean is, “I hate being forced to take inventory of the quality and volume of love in my life.”
Justine Zwiebel/BuzzFeed
There are few holidays that conjure the collective groan of the public like Valentine's Day does. Every year, there is at least one finger-wagging article about either the commodification of love or about how the historical St. Valentine would scarcely recognize the saccharine rituals of his feast day. The weeks leading up to Valentine's Day are a time of competitive suffering between couples and singles. The former wring their hands about the pressure to have a picture-perfect Valentine's Day plan, while the latter bemoan the dearth of romantic prospects in their target demographic. People who are otherwise rational indulge in conspiracy theories about the profit-mad corporations that make greeting cards and nondescript teddy bears. The minuscule portion of the population that admits to liking the holiday is dismissed as naïve and subsequently banished from their home cities.
This is the last Valentine's Day that I'll spend in my twenties, and since I am presently unattached, I should be more determined than ever to ruin it for others. Instead, I am determined to naysay the Valentine's Day naysayers by championing this holiday as not only harmless in its approach to love but as a critical tool for understanding it. Valentine's Day is so difficult not because it makes love a commodity but because it presents us with the challenge of looking at the richness, or lack thereof, of our romantic lives. When people say, "I hate Valentine's Day," what they often mean is, "I hate being forced to take inventory of the quality and volume of love in my life."
As a diehard believer in the magic of Christmas, I am usually too fatigued by holiday evangelism to pay much attention to Valentine's Day. But now I find myself reflecting more on the holiday as I receive what feels like an endless stream of PR pitches about Valentine's Day gifts, dating apps, and the love experts who guarantee a fresh take on the big questions about love. The phrase "What better way to show your love than [insert product or service here]?" appears often and earnestly in these emails. The most immediate answer is "almost anything else" when they are selling pink-hued tchotchkes or a chance to attend a singles mixer for dog owners with a pun-laced name. But I think the more accurate answer is, "Well, nothing especially." Because ultimately the gestures of gifts and dates and sweet nothings between couples and their absence in the lives of single people are never going to adequately capture our feelings of love or of love's absence.
In 2014, I spent Valentine's Day snorting lines of prescription painkillers and having sex with a man whose love I desperately wanted. We were on-again, off-again for most of our relationship, and he emerged from an off-again spell that evening to tell me that he missed me and wanted me to come over. I grudgingly accepted his invitation when he offered to send a cab at his own expense, a gesture that signaled his desire more than his care. At one point he took a Snapchat of himself taking a line of Percocet off my ass and then smugly grinning at the camera, demonstrating to friends on the receiving end of the video that he had the best of both worlds: a girl to spend the night with but one that he clearly didn't have to extend anything so vulnerable as love to. I was good enough to show off but not good enough to be spared from having our most intimate moments on display.
In 2013, I accidentally scheduled a first date for Valentine's Day because we both looked at the day of the week rather than the date. Like most dates in Brooklyn, the lead-up to it doubled as a competition in the Blasé Olympics, with both of us doing our best to not appear to care about the date's outcome. I remember that we got oysters, that he smelled strange, that he attempted to tip way too little, and that he lived in a part of town that it wouldn't be worthwhile to make the trip to. I won the Blasé Olympics by default because he wanted a second date and I flatly declined. It was a Valentine's Day so comically devoid of any potential for love that it made the acute loneliness that I felt later that evening less heartbreaking than it might have been otherwise.
In 2012, I was in a loving long-term relationship. I have little memory of what we did on Valentine's Day because I recall the best parts of that relationship not as days of the year or our grandest gestures but in brief memories of our time together. I remember times we lost our breath laughing or sang songs in the car together in a way you're only supposed to sing when you're all alone. I do recall that we exchanged the familiar Valentine's Day objects during the years we were together. But they get mixed up with a record player and American Apparel sweaters from other holidays in the collection of artifacts from the relationship.
If I had brought a Cupid figurine wearing sunglasses to that apartment in 2014, the Snapchat would still have been sent. If my date in 2013 had brought a heart-shaped box of candy, it would not have been an antidote to my loneliness. And when my boyfriend in 2012 gave me a stuffed animal on Valentine's Day, it did not replace our abiding love with a cheap toy from the drugstore.
