Valentine’s Day to me, always just seemed like a good way for shops to rebrand unsold chocolate from the Christmas period following the healthy month of January. There’s so much pressure around it: “What will I get my valentine? What if they don’t get me anything? How much is too much? How much is too little?” The pressure is bizarre. You shouldn’t need to validate your relationship with cards and presents that apparently proclaim your love for your partner. That’s not how love should work. You shouldn’t need a singular day to show someone how much you care, it’s something you should do all the time. Valentine’s Day is just one of the many ways that capitalism makes its presence in our lives known, as it forces us to equate love with materialism.

 

At this point, I feel obliged to tell you that I’m not in a relationship, and I haven’t been since my teenage years. What’s more, I was dumped just two days after Valentine’s Day by my only boyfriend, if you could even call him that. Despite not being at all upset by the break-up, it really exposed to me the falsity and chauvinistic nature of Valentine’s Day. There was chocolate, there was a date, there were even flowers. While these were certainly a corner mark of what I was expected to do, it didn’t even feel slightly sincere to me, it didn’t feel as remotely significant as I expected it to feel. In short, it didn’t feel “worth the hype” or even how I expected a relationship on Valentine’s Day to look. It wasn’t like how the movies portrayed it at all. All the pageantry of the day was included, but I definitely didn’t “feel the love”. 

 

Low and behold following this, a measly 48 hours later, I received a text telling me that the relationship wasn’t going to work. I was eighteen, and I think the baselessness of the whole relationship was probably exposed by just how little I cared about the break-up after recovering from the initial “what the f**k” shock. But the relationship undoubtedly did not end because of a lousy Valentine’s date. The entire relationship was more of a relationship of convenience; we ran in the same social circles, we had the same friends and after multiple attempts to ask me out, I finally gave in and I ended up in a relationship that was bound to never work out before it even began. I had never wanted anything serious, but I felt like I was stuck in a situation that I couldn’t get out of. Upon thinking about it following the breakup, I realised the whole relationship was over a long time before that doomed Valentine’s date. The day was very obviously an attempt to add rose and chocolate covered plasters on the death-wound of the relationship. The day was just an attempt to save something that never should have existed in the first place. Valentine’s Day, then, in this particular instance, was definitely more about keeping up an image than any actual, substantial feelings. 

 

So why did we celebrate Valentine’s Day at all? There clearly wasn’t love, and there also weren’t any good intentions behind all the presents, so was there any meaning behind the whole affair? I’d tried to end the relationship three weeks before Valentine’s Day, but after a bunch of vapid promises and a worry of not wanting to affect my friends, I’d agreed to give it another shot. There was really no need for the presents or the dates at that point, because I genuinely don’t think either of us even wanted to be there. There could have been rooms filled with roses and devoted love poems, he could’ve flown in macaroons from Paris, and I would have felt nothing at all. There was no point to it. With my own expectations of Valentine’s Day, and the already failed relationship, there was nothing filled with love or lust, or anything in between in my Valentine’s Day experience. The expectation of being “swept off my feet” was either unrealistic, or wouldn’t have existed in that particular relationship anyway. I was more concerned about what other people thought about it, what other people thought about the relationship itself and our Valentine’s Day. He’d met my family, and they wanted to know what we’d be doing on Valentine’s. Our friends had been asking me for weeks what we were planning on doing. I was even haunted by radio ads and Dunnes Stores promotions for two weeks beforehand. None of it, on my part, was sincere; I was more concerned with Valentine’s Day looking perfect than actually enjoying any aspect of it. When I think about it now, all I remember from it is how fake it all was, with both of us probably more concerned with people seeing it on Instagram than either of us actually enjoying it (or believing that there was love involved, for that matter). 

 

 

I say all this, but the idea of Valentine’s Day remains conflicting for me, even with this strange memory haunting the day. While the puke-worthy posts by some couples proclaiming how much they love each other on a regular basis online does make me cringe, there is something intoxicating about seeing people genuinely happy. We are all inclined to roll our eyes and tell people to “get a room” when they express their love, but there is something really lovely, I always think, about seeing people together, and seeing how happy it makes them. There’s always a small part of us that yearns for that kind of “happy togetherness”, no matter how single we may be. So, despite the chauvinistic nature of couple’s posts and the obvious capitalist undertones of Valentine’s Day, I find myself inclined to want to enjoy it. You want someone to message you, or ask you on a date (albeit virtually this year), you want someone to say that they care about you, in whatever way they can. If you care about someone, you find yourself almost thinking about messaging them and telling them, before the fear of rejection sets in and you laugh it off. I guess at a very fundamental level, a lot of us do really want what Hallmark is selling; that love is real and you want to have it. 

Perhaps it’s my own obsession with romance novels and absolutely terrible rom-coms on Netflix, but every February I find myself looking for something to happen to substantiate my culturally-ordained preconceptions that the time of year is specifically and inherently romantic. I want to hope that the idealistic version of love is possible, and it’s just around the corner. I want to hope that someone who I never expected to do so actually cares about me, and wants to let me know. I know that the possibility of anyone acting like Justin Timberlake at the end of Friends with Benefits is not at all likely. Perhaps it’s being raised on Disney films, and thinking that finding “the one” is what constitutes  a happy ending. But on Valentine’s Day, I always find myself disappointed that nothing happens, or disappointed that even some small part of me even wished that it would, even though there is no relationship or even the semblance of one in my life, I still find myself hoping there will be something, like it’ll come out of nowhere like the random prince at the end of Snow White. However, I’m aware that the traditional fairy-tale endings are not even remotely realistic. Real life isn’t a romance film, but hey, it wouldn’t be absolutely awful to receive a card in the post. I suppose I still have hope in the lead-up to the day (just in case), and even though I know it’s completely irrational to hold out hope for it, I find myself slightly disappointed following the lack of love-proclamations. 

 

Here lie my own conflicting feelings about Valentine’s Day. As a result of actually witnessing how false it can be, yet also wanting to maybe experience what the songs say, I find myself not knowing how to view the holiday which each new year brings. On the one hand, I would love to say that Valentine’s Day is just a waste of time – capitalism’s way of telling you that you have to buy things to make your feelings valid. On the other hand, I  very much like to have hope that something could happen, out of nowhere, and sweep me off my feet. This hope isn’t exactly realistic, and maybe I should leave my dreams of wish-fulfilment to the movies. But maybe, just maybe, a Valentine’s experience built on real love is possible. Who knows? Certainly not me. 

 

This idea that is sold to us by card-makers and chocolatier promoters, that we need this  holiday to “show someone how much we care” is, in my opinion anyway, definitely more about selling products than trying to promote any idea of love. There is no amount of flowers, or chocolates, or cheesy cards, that can assure someone that you mean what you say when you tell them how you feel, the only thing that can truly prove your affection is your actions. You definitely can’t throw pretty phrases and teddy-bear presents at your partner in hopes of saving the relationship. However, I guess they can act as helping agents for trying to tell someone how you feel. In a time where everything is so strange and distanced, I don’t think it’s ever mattered more to promote the idea that if you care about them, you shouldn’t wait until February 14 to “shoot your shot”. Life is too short and temperamental to stay in a relationship you’re not happy in, but it’s also too short to not tell people how you feel. Not to be a cliché, but if you never try, you’ll never know.

 

My own Valentine’s Day this year, however, will consist largely of eating cake and logging out of Instagram. Probably a Disney film, and plenty of cuddles from my dogs. Regardless of what your plans are this Valentine’s Day, try not to get caught up in the materialistic nature of the holiday, and focus on what’s important to you.