February 12 - Don’t Celebrate Valentines Day.

As you may have guessed from the title, I’m not of fan of the romantically oriented holiday that falls on the Tuesday of this week. I’m suggesting that you feel free to simply ignore it, and I’d like to list some reasons for this position.

First, its cruel to those who are lonely. While this reality is true of many other holidays, and I know people in North America with absent or estranged families find Christmas difficult, other holidays are not organized around a single social status the way Valentine’s Day is. Valentine’s Day implicitly enforces the expectation that to be a full, normal participant of our culture, you should be in a successful, happy romantic relationship. This expectation is not only unfair to those who’ve found it difficult to establish such a relationship, but also unreasonable to the general social structure of our society.

We, as a society and a culture, need full and empowered participation by those in all kinds of social statuses and relationship. We need all those perspectives to understand who we are and what we ought to be doing with our time and resources. Declaring that the only really real or successful people are those in long time committed relationship risks losing the perspectives of many others: those who’ve intentionally chosen celebecy, those who have been often rejected and forced bitterly to give up on relationships, those whose have a long series of shorter relationships and even the honestly and intentionally poly-amorous.

Second, it creates strange guilt and expectation in relationships and marriages. Let me put it this way: if my wife is truly upset by the fact that I’ve forgotten an externally mandated celebration of our love, and if our marriage is actually damaged by my lack of providing flowers and chocolates, then there is something seriously wrong with our marriage. In a healthy relationship, we don’t need external excuses to buy gifts or remind each other of our affection. These reminders happen as part of our natural care and conscious effort to maintain our love. Moreover, these reminders of our affection are spontaneous and honest. An act of love which is pressured by the guilt or expectation created by an event such as Valentine's day is, at some level, suspect. Acts of love should simply be that -- acts motivated by love for your partner, not guilt or expectation.

Third, it's become very commercial. I’m not sure -- maybe it always was this commercial, but it feels that the major driving forces behind the holiday are market forces seeking to sell Valentine's day gifts and services. Moreover, it’s assumed that the way to show affection on the holiday is to spend money on something. While spending money and buying gifts can be an excellent way to show affection, having it as the default method in a holiday which is only about romantic relationships is terrifying to me. Spending money to show your love should be one of very many different ways, and certainly not the default.

Fourth, it has little to do with St. Valentine. Now, I admit this is mostly a complaint about the name, and that the history of how certain themes get associated to certain saints is a strange history, but I still find it odd. As far as I know, little is known of St. Valentine other that the fact that he was a martyr in the Roman Church. This association of his name with the holiday just seems strange to me.

Therefore, I’m suggesting you consider giving it a skip. Particularly if you are in a relationship and are feeling strangeness, guilt, insecurity and confusion about all the expectations, then suggest to your partner that you forgo the occasion. Have faith that suggesting you don’t need Valentine's day is not the same thing as suggesting that you lack love -- in fact, it may make you more able to demonstrate real affection in more honest, less culturally loaded situations.

Lastly, my wife makes the excellent point after reading the above that a more productive suggestion might be to expand the holiday instead of ignoring it. Celebrating love is a good thing, and one could celebrate the love in all relationships, instead of just focusing on romantic relationships.

Post Scriptum: I wrote the previous before I saw February 13th's XKCD comic. Unsurprisingly, Randall Munroe captures the essence of the problem much more succintly and amusingly.