Valentine’s Day is one of the lesser commercial holidays, well behind Christmas and the Fourth of July, so it doesn’t take up a huge amount of calendar-attention real estate. If we’re being honest, you’re not reading a column about Valentine’s Day if the publication date is any but this one. But today it is, so here we go:
I never know how to field Valentine’s Day because I don’t want to be predictably cynical. We cannot always choose our feelings, though, so buckle up.
Hear me out. I know I have been candid about my distaste for St Patrick’s Day (still the dumbest holiday and by a wide margin). But I dearly love the pageantry of Christmas and I think Super Bowl Sunday is basically me replicating my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, but with better food, so I can criticize this one with a clear conscience.
As a holiday Valentine’s Day peaks around 17, when you still hold hope that the awkwardness of love’s learning curves can be for one night conquered by the cleanly scripted path of holiday ritual. (Spoiler: It cannot.)
Valentine’s Day quickly climbs in both obligate expense and boozy-tiff incidence until it settles into a place roughly equivalent in import to a minor anniversary despite it often feeling like one :airquotes: should :airquotes: be doing more. New Year’s Eve follows a similar trajectory.
Eventually, though, you walk into Walgreens, February 1, and everything is red and overpriced and heart-shaped and you kinda roll your eyes to yourself and the word “tawdry” drifts through your head and you think, “Are we still doing this? Haven’t we grown?” and then you realize sadly that this is who you are now. Sadly, because you don’t want to be that cynic. You still want the excitement (on both sides of the equation) when there are flowers before homeroom period. You want the excitement of being young and on a date on a day where there’s a little extra English on you two being there together. You remember what it feels like to make that major-then/minor-now statement “What we are is important enough for Valentine’s Day.”
And as you think about it, you maybe come around to the idea that it’s actually nice that we kinda devote a holiday to love. One can disambiguate an idea from its implementation.
I wish we’d open it up more, though. If we let it be less about romantic gestures and more about love, it’d be a lot more inclusive.
Which seems a good thing for a holiday about love to be.
Alan Brouilette writes a monthly column for the Forest Park Review, a Growing Community Media publication.