Valentine's Day is one of the most prominent holidays in our calendar year. You see advertising plastered over every possible surface. And to be honest, the concept is nice, but it's the execution that fails us.
Valentine's Day is supposed to be about love and spending time with whomever you love. Yet the tradition actually started as a Roman festival of Lupercalia, in which men would whip women with the hides of animal skins and then be matched with them for the night. If the match went well, they would stay together. Although the women were being whipped, in those days, it was considered an honor and was thought to increase the fertility of the woman.
This pagan tradition was a nuisance to the Christian movement, so in 496, Pope Gelasius recast the festival as a Christian feast in honor of St. Valentine.
Its origin is as a holiday about fertility and matchmaking, but it has turned into a holiday about buying gifts.
The main reason I think Valentine's Day is an overrated holiday is because of this consumerism, an opinion that is often disputed by those who love the holiday. The thing about the consumerism surrounding the day is that some people feel loved when they get gifts, which is okay. And some people express love by giving gifts, which is also totally fine, but some people don't feel that way.
The commercialization of the holiday has put a societal pressure on couples to follow a certain format, which doesn't promote healthy relationships for everyone. There are many different ways to give and receive love and the way this holiday is celebrated excludes the other forms of love.
Societal pressure isn't just about gift giving either. Valentine's Day has become a "sexy" holiday, promoting more sexuality on this day. There ends up being a pressure on couples, both new and old, to have sex or something along those lines. This is something that should never just be expected because of a holiday, and should never be forced upon any relationship, no matter how long they have been together.
The holiday has also traditionally been overwhelmingly heterosexual in nature, making it hard for couples who don't fit within the heteronormative limitations to find things that represent their relationship. Even though this has started to get better in recent years, the advertising world makes it clear that the mainstream relationship status should be heterosexual.
Holidays are something people get to decide to celebrate, in theory, but the realization that most of our celebrated holidays conform to a Christian ideology makes it a complicated topic. I am not Christian, I never have been, but I know all the Christian holidays because of our society. It is my choice to not celebrate a holiday that has been stripped of its ancient traditions and now supports an unhealthy amount of consumerism.
So I do not celebrate Valentine's Day, but not because I'm single.
