By Jarrett Quick.
You know what’s romantic? Being told to buy things to prove you love someone. As a single person, I may be a little jaded about the holidays, but that doesn’t mean Valentine’s day is worth the coerced pageantry.
On the brightside, I can generally ignore it and dry my lonely tears with the money I didn’t spend on a teddy bear or jewelry meant to symbolize a love that can’t be shown any other day of the year.
Ignoring Valentine’s Day is, in most cases, a heart-shaped death sentence. God forbid you show your love to your significant other organically rather than by the schedule of long dead saints and the gods of Hallmark.
Additionally, the holiday is relatively one-sided towards one gender. It isn’t anyone’s fault necessarily that the weight is greatly shifted toward the female gender, but it’s doing nothing for gender equality.
I appreciate the idea of the holiday being an opportunity for couples to be grateful to each other, but plenty of fights happen on Valentine’s Day about the very holiday itself. It’s a day that can highlight a couples imperfections and, at times, inadvertently forcing people to compare their own relations against other couples through material goods and forced romantic expressions. Who doesn’t love scheduled affection and needless pressure to out do the artificial romantic expressions of others? We are supposed to think that a simple phone call or letter expressing one’s love to another isn’t enough. We need to buy jewelry, chocolates, and overly priced greeting cards to prove we really care.
Jewelry is guilty of this everyday of the year, but they go all out banana-nut flavored crazy around Valentine’s Day. I can’t all out disagree with receiving candy, though, unless it’s those chalky hearts with the world’s least creative “love” notes on them.
I recently opened a box to see how exciting the the updated text lingo hearts were and the first one I pulled out said “Whuz Up.” If that doesn’t send someone completely head over heels in love with you, nothing will.
Maybe if I had a factory that exclusively produced red and pink dye, or if I owned a store with a vastly over stocked collection of teddy bears that say, “I wuv you,” I would be on board. Sadly, I don’t.
For those of you in a relationship, the holiday is unavoidable, so I can at least leave you with a tip.
If you have no idea what to get your significant other, tell them you already got them something and have them guess what it is. Their guesses will give you a whole list of ideas.
I may hate the holiday but at least I can help out those who can’t escape it.
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