DISCLAIMER: My being single at the time of this blog entry has no influence on my views for Valentine’s Day as a whole. I’ve had these views since my junior year of high school when I awakened to commercialism and how retailers were taking advantage of love. Commercialism is the attitude or actions of people who are influenced too strongly by the desire to earn money or buy goods rather than values. Valentine’s Day is all about profits and goods, not love like advertising states.
Ah, Valentine’s Day, February 14th: The day society forces you into a buying frenzy all in a sole effort to show and tell OTHER people that you love someone they may or may not know. Nope, Valentine’s Day is not for the actual person you love, though that is the message from commercials, store windows, billboards. etc. Oh no! I venture to say Valentine’s Day is a spectator sport. Sure the one you love may be oh so happy and appreciative of the gift(s) but think about what is the first thing they do after they’ve gotten past the fake and sometimes genuine surprise? They brag. And why do people – nope, women – get upset when they do not receive a Valentine’s Day gift? Because they have nothing to brag about leaving others with room to judge their relationship or the validity of their relationship. This then begs the question: Is Valentine’s Day about love or proving love?
When you research the history of Valentine’s Day you find a wealth of information dating back to the late 5th century (496 A.D.) that has almost nothing to do with love. What I found in my research was that Valentine’s Day started under the likes of sex, murder, rape, romance, food, and religion. Very little to do with love. Many people scream, “St. Valentine,” yet when you look into his origin, you don’t find much. You find so little to where the Roman Catholic Church removed St. Valentine’s Day from its general calendar in 1969. However here we are, 2019, still celebrating this day symbolized with red and pink, two of my three favorite colors.
I have a close friend, sister if you will, born on February 14th and since we were quite young, she rarely celebrates her birthday ON her actual day. Why not? Because her friends in relationships have plans and restaurants are packed with people (as my mother would say), “putting on their best behavior in front of company.” People are out, dressed in their Sunday’s Best just to say to others without actually saying it, “I’m with this person and here we are together, dining on THIS day. Our personal relationship is worth showing you strangers that it exists.” At least that’s what I think they are saying lol. Yet my sister-friend has to either celebrate Valentine’s Day with her significant other and put her birthday on the back burner or don’t celebrate at all on HER born day. What kind of odds are those? How fair is that to her and others born on February 14th when birthday celebrations are quite personal? How fair was it to her mom and other mothers who couldn’t/can’t participate in the facade of love? It wasn’t and isn’t fair at all.
With regards to heterosexual couples: Did you know that Valentine’s Day is supposed to be celebrated between men AND women, not solely FOR women? Yep, women are supposed to celebrate their men on this (enter sarcasm) fine, festive day as well as being celebrated by their men. However, that’s not what we really see here in America; not on tv nor in the streets. What we see are stores reminding MEN and men only, not to forget their “loved one” on this particular day. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, my father went to the same donut shop every Saturday morning to have donuts for the house by the time my sister and I were up and out of bed. He always knew when Valentine’s Day was on a Saturday or Sunday because the donuts were all of a sudden shaped into hearts and frosted with red and pink frosting. My father would order the usual for me and my sister, then add a pink or red one for my mother. We’d laugh and he’d be full of smiles because he (here we go with the show-and-tell), showed his girls that he loved their mother, his wife. My mother would laugh, eat the donut, and walk away as if nothing happened. She was being normal. Did she buy him a donut or pay him back as her way of saying Happy Valentine’s Day to him? Nope!
Actually, how many times have you heard men say what they received on Valentine’s Day other than sexual favors from their female counterparts if that? Sure, some women are not selfish and will give their male counterparts a love gift. However, the unselfish are the minority. Selfish women who punish their men for not purchasing gifts along with retailers have changed the gamut of Valentine’s Day to where we now have March 14th deemed as “Steak and Blowjob Day.” There’s even a website (http://www.steakandbjday.com/) for reference on how to cook the steak and how to give a good blowjob. On the website’s homepage, it says, “That’s right, there’s no special holiday for the ladies to show their appreciation for the men in their life. ” This is untrue. This is false. The day for men is SUPPOSED to be February 14th also. Where is the fairness in this game, ladies, retailers? As hyper-sexual as our American society has become, I’m surprised I don’t see ads, commercials, and billboards for March 14th, although there is a hashtag following on social media.
So anyhoo, this is my reasoning as to why Valentine’s Day should be vanquished or at least repurposed. Sure, it’s beautiful to celebrate love and show others that you are in love with your significant other. As a hopeless romantic, I love the mere idea of love and all of its naturalness. What I detest most about Valentine’s Day is how society is telling him albeit yelling at him to prove to strangers how much he loves me under the guise of informing me in the most romantic of ways. I’d appreciate the expression of love more if he did it on his own. That’s all I’m saying. The show-and-tell of love SHOULD be more reverenced when it’s done from the heart at free will, not because of a billboard Mr. saw while sitting at a red light or the commercials airing while he’s watching basketball or all of the heart paraphernalia he sees that magically appears in the stores almost the day after January 1st.
Writing Waves 