a moderate defense of Valentine's Day

[kindkit]

I'm not romantically involved with anyone, so I won't be celebrating Valentine's Day. In fact, Valentine's Day has seldom been personally much fun for me--even when I had a much more active romantic life than I do now, I often seemed to be single on the day itself.

However, I like Valentine's Day. To an extent, and with caution. Yes, I recognize that it can make people without partners feel lonely; I know this from experience. Yes, I know that like every other big western holiday, it's hideously commercialized. But I really like the idea of a holiday to celebrate romantic love. Romantic love is a wonderful thing; when I've experienced it, it has made me happy. (And yes, I also recognize that the concept of romantic love has a troublesome history, one mixed up with the disempowerment-by-idealization of women, not to mention the invisibility of same-sex love. But, you know, pretty much everything has a troublesome history. I don't believe cultural practices are always irrecuperably tainted by their history. Also? The position of women is/was not necessarily better in cultures without a concept of romantic love like the modern west's.)

I have no problem with people who dislike Valentine's Day and choose not to celebrate it. Unless they go around spreading the misinformation that Valentine's Day was invented by the Hallmark greeting card company or some other commercial enterprise; it's simply not true.

I do, nevertheless, find myself getting a bit tetchy at the insistent expressions of righteous loathing one sees every year around this time. Not liking Valentine's Day does not make someone better. There's no particular moral purity in it. And liking Valentine's Day in principle, liking romantic love, does not make me stupid, or naive, or a tool of the goddamn patriarchy. So I could do without the scolding, thanks.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I don't care what adults do (and most of my annoyance at the commercial side comes from working in retail pharmacy while being sensitive to scents) but it really does confuse and alarm me that schoolchildren in the US seem to participate, too. The concept of 7-year-olds giving each other valentine's cards and the day being celebrated in schools is incredibly weird to me.

[senmut]

It's more of a platonic thing there...and I always liked the fact it was equal opportunity. Girls don't just give cards to boys, and boys to girls. Plus, most of the v-cards when I was in school....ages ago...were about friendship.

It might be why I'm not that good at expressing the romantic side of it, though. It's always been about celebrating all my closenesses, not just my one (or several) true loves!

[kindkit]

It was the case in my primary school that every kid was supposed to give a card to every other kid. There are still problems with that--among other things it obliges families to buy or make a bunch of cards--but it was intended to be a fun friendship thing and not a romantic thing that people would be excluded from. Of course, exclusion did happen sometimes, because kids are highly capable of finding creative ways to exclude and hurt each other.

I'd just as soon it wasn't celebrated in schools; let it be a holiday for adults.

[starlady]

In my schools everyone either had to give valentines to everyone or to no one at all, which reduced the opportunity for genuine sentiment. In my recollection at least half the point was the candy that almost everyone gave out with their valentines. Though I do remember making very careful choices about which of my classmates got which valentine message out of the box of cards.

But, you know, now that I think about it, I can totally see why it would be weird. It is weird.