Another year, another Valentine’s Day spent by myself doing something to take my mind off the fact that it is perhaps my least favourite day of the year.
This year I have decided to do this by listening to music about failed relationships (Bruce Springsteen at present) and indulging in my latest enforced hobby, blogging.
But none of these can take away my intense hatred of February 14
th, .
Before I go any further, there are bound to be people reading this (an assertion if ever there was one) who will accuse me of bitterness, and perhaps they are right. I broke up with my last girlfriend two years ago tomorrow and since then my love life has been more barren than the Sahara desert during a heatwave. In the time I’ve been alone, my ex has gotten married – I heard about it via Facebook. Add to this that I didn’t get any cards this year, nor did I have anyone to send one to, and I’m sure that many could accuse me of sour grapes.
However, there are many reason’s to hate Valentine’s Day. First of all, look at the time of year. It’s February, is this really a good month to hold a celebration of all things romantic? The trees are bare, the roads are covered in grit salt and every other person you meet is carrying a tissue full of green/yellow material recently extracted from their nose. Romantic, I think not. Christmas Visa bills are also still weighing heavily on our minds. So at a time when the scenery is far from picturesque, illness is in the air and nobody’s got much money we are all suddenly expected to spend a day throwing cash around and devoting ourselves to our significant others. Surely, if a day such as Valentine’s is needed, May would be a better month to hold it.
Our shops become havens of tacky paraphernalia. Six-foot high badly made teddies with “Be Mine” inscribed upon them, CDs with titles like “The Ultimate Love” keeping Phil Collins and Celine Dion in royalties for another year and greeting cards with the kind of retching prose that even those two wouldn’t include in their songs. To be blunt, the merchandise is crap. I’ve never understood why people consider it a sign of adoration to give or receive something they would never be able to display publically without suffering gross outbursts of embarrassment.
And then there is the cynical profiteering of other industries involved in the Valentine debacle. Restaurants, confectioners and florists do extremely well out of Valentine’s Day, charging extortionate prices for what is no more than normal produce. Ask them whether the day is about love or money and they’ll tell you to close the till on your way out, darling.
The worst of it is that the people who have the power to stop all this, namely us, do nothing. I have heard people express their own dislike of Valentine’s Day in every year that I can consciously remember and I’m sure many others could testify to the same, so it can be assumed that discontent like mine is widely felt. Yet every year we still go out in the freezing cold to buy garish gifts and eat dinner in overpriced sub-standard restaurants.
I personally believe we need we need to examine why we celebrate this day. There were at least three saints called Valentine, all of whom were Catholic martyrs in the first couple of Christian centuries. Not much is known of any of them, and even what is known doesn’t point to them being great romantics. The idea of modern Valentine’s Day seems to have arisen through a Chaucer love poem mentioning the day by coincidence.
What seems likely is that Valentine’s is a hangover from Roman festivals of fertility, which were often held in February. Perhaps we need to revisit this as an idea. We would need to celebrate a modern fertility festival indoors, thus avoiding the February weather and the extortion in one fell swoop. There would also be no need to buy any gifts. Now this is the kind of celebration I could go in for.
Then again, maybe I am just bitter…
