Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and whether you’re single, married, dating, divorced, excited, bitter, hopeful, or sad, it’s impossible to let the day go by without thinking about Love just a little bit, and wondering what it all means.
The proverbial grass is always greener, and as such, those in lukewarm relationships might find themselves fantasizing about freer, more exciting times, while singletons yearn for someone to cuddle with on the couch.
But whereas Valentine’s day may once have been about rekindling romance and celebrating love, it’s now become a kind of two-headed monster.
For couples, there’s this incredible pressure to make it special. “In that same way,” says a friend of mine, “that people try to have a REALLY good night on New Year’s Eve.” Which never lives up to anyone’s expectations.
Worse than the pressure to have a wonderfully, gooey, romantic evening is the trend towards “transactionism” on Valentine’s day. Men are expected to be romantic, which leads women to think that they have to “pay back” the romance with their own currency, sex. But then it gets to the point where men expect the sex and are essentially trying to “buy” it with romantics gestures, gifts, nights on the town. Then women think that if they’re going to put out it had better be worth it, and so with every turn of this vicious cycle the stakes are raised higher and higher.
Jezebel has even calculated the cost of your vagina on Valentine’s Day. $218.
But why should men be the ones to bring the romance? Shouldn’t showing your partner than you love them be a mutual show of affection and love?
And why should women be the ones to put out? Framing sex in terms of a reward that women give out for good behavior transforms sex into something that just men–not women–want.
For couples, Valentine’s Day has only served to solidify the gendered division of women and the gatekeepers of sex and men as the gatekeepers of romance.
But sex and romance should both equally be the responsibility of both partners.
For singles, Valentine’s Day is just as polarizing. You’re either for it or against it and you have to pick a side; it’s very difficult to be ambivalent about it.
Bitter misanthropes spend the day raining cynicism on bright-eyed hopefuls from their cloud of disdain. At best, they’re the ones who sound off about how materialistic and commercialized everyone had become; how Valentine’s Day is a manufactured holiday, invented by Hallmark to sell cards and chocolates. At worst they’re derisive and mean about couples’ expressions of affection or singles’ expressions of independence.
On the other side, you have happy, self-affirming single ladies celebrating and each other on GALentine’s Day. (I say single ladies because, let’s face it, how many single guys do you know off celebrating PALentine’s Day with each other?) These girls are strong, confident, independent women who aren’t crushed by the idea of being alone on a day that celebrates love. Instead, of being validated by men, they validate themselves.
It sounds pretty healthy to have a day that celebrates singledom in tandem with coupled love. But the problem here is that if you don’t spend the time and effort to celebrate your awesome single self, you kind of default into the bitter misanthrope camp. People interpret that very refusal to partake in the explicit positive as an implicit negative.
Valentine’s Day, in theory, could just be about demonstrating your love–romantic or otherwise–for the people in your life. But it’s become so fraught with expectations that can’t be met that it inevitably leads to disappointment, which makes people feel inadequate and unloveable and alienated–the very opposite of what Valentine’s Day should do.
Valentines Day is over, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be generous with the people in your life.
Show someone you love them today, in a different way!
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