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Roses are redViolets are blueI regret to reportI think Valentine’s Day is cute
I’m sorry, but I do. Pink? Cute. Red? Cute. Heart shapes? Cute. Kitschy vintage Valentines with puns? Cute!
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A lot of people really hate this holiday with the fire of a thousand suns for many completely valid reasons. There’s a lot of gender-role garbage bound up in Valentine’s Day, which also tends to be intensely heteronormative. If you’re nursing a heartbreak or single (and don’t want to be), this holiday can be a painful reminder of that fact.
There’s also a lot of expectations created by capitalist forces that insist you declare your love by spending lots of money on mass-produced drugstore teddy bears holding roses and $7 pieces of paper.
In high school, I was a cog in the Greeting Card Industrial Complex; working in a shop that sold both cards and chocolates, me and my fellow aproned girls behind the counter would absolutely judge the parade of men who reliably came on the evening of the 13th — but more often on the 14th — their eyes feral and panicked as they examined our picked-over wares.
Many people’s dislike of the holiday stems from school-era Valentine’s Days, which could be a real site of social exclusion. The Valentine exchanges in the pre-anti-bullying messaging era were a vibe, let me tell you. Ditto the candy grams and flower grams in high school, where popular kids were showered with treats while everyone else just sort of awkwardly watched.
For a long time, when people would complain about how much Valentine’s Day sucks and is “fake” (as opposed to those honest, real holidays, like Flag Day), I’d be right in there with them, lest I be labelled, in modern parlance, “cringe.”
It’s cringe to be earnest. It’s cringe to like things, especially if those things are kitschy capitalist holidays.
But you know what? Whatever. I think Valentine’s Day is cute.
And yes, sure, the day is named for Saint Valentine who is, as you might expect, the patron saint of “courtly love.” But he is also the patron saint of epilepsy* and beekeepers, so I figure if he can have that kind of range, so can the day itself.
Valentine’s Day doesn’t need to be about romantic love. It can be about any kind of love. It can also be about reaching out to folks who might be lonely, or doing something nice for someone else. It can be doing something you love, or watching something you love.
What’s not to love about that?
*my (limited) research is divided on why this is. Some say it’s because he cured someone of epilepsy, others say it’s because he may have suffered from it himself. The beekeeper thing is because bees, honey, honey, sweet. Again, cute!
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