Ah, Valentines Day. It is time for that great Imagined-Need for Love and Romance. You can feel the desperation in the error!
Contrary to popular delusion you, as an adult, do not NEED romance or love. You may LIKE it a lot. You might even feel an intense desire to have it. Still you don’t actually NEED it. Your continued existence is not contingent upon having romance or love in your life. Even your joy is not contingent upon having romance of love, unless you make such an arrangement with yourself.
Here on Valentine’s Day we have a chance to see a Preference inflated in importance to the point where people treat it as if it was a Need. Love and romance are wonderful. They can greatly enrich your life. They can remarkably increase your joy. Still nobody NEEDS them. At most they want them.
If you happen to be one of the very large number of people who doesn’t have love and romance in your life right now, then don’t use this holiday as an excuse to beat yourself up about it. You are totally and completely ok without romance. You might dislike not having it, but don’t blow that dislike out of proportion. If you want love or romance and don’t have them today then you have 365 days to work on gaining those things until next years Valentines Day rolls around.
Uccisore argued in another thread that the Internet is not culture, but consumerism; and yet, we have faith-based holidays in America that howl the fact that American Christiandom is undeniably a consumerism.
Valentine’s Day is a perfect example of the illusion that money and materialism brings happiness and love.
I don’t agree. I think we all need romance and love - what we don’t need is another holiday like Valentine’s day making us feel like we are missing something - face it, the couples you might see today as the perfect love match may be the ones with a restraining order with each other in another year. The media illlusion of Valentines makes married and perfectly happy, unattached people miserable.
Valentine’s Day is a capitalist festival designed to make women even more competitive, but competitive by proxy in terms of ‘who can get their man to buy the largest, most expensive and garish symbol of love’.
By all means fall in love. By all means be romantic. By all means buy each other stuff. But don’t do it because this is a day when it’s expected of you. Do it because you love someone, not because everyone else is doing it. If the person truly matters to you, you will get them NOTHING on Valentine’s Day.
SIATD, I agree and disagree with you. It shouldn’t be about getting things or spending or whatever, and if two people are really happy together then it doesn’t require huge displays.
But on the other hand, I know that my partner will appreciate it. We don’t exactly see eye to eye on consumerism and holidays and such, and I see it as a day when I can swallow my beliefs and my pride and do something for the person I care about. And yeah, it’s got to involve spending because not much is free. It doesn’t have to be lavish (I’ve found that it’s better appreciated when it’s lavish in forthought, regardless the cost).
I think it should say ‘If the person truly matters to you, you will expect nothing, and give them whatever they want.’
My objection is that the love shared between a couple is precisely that - shared between them. If they want to buy each other gifts and cards and all the rest, then fine, they can go right ahead. But why the hell should they need the rest of society interfering with their shared love and telling them when it is and isn’t appropriate to do such things? Why should love, probably the most personal thing in the world, be subject to massive social mores and traditions?
So, to reform my statement above: ‘if the person truly matters to you then you’ll buy them gifts because you love them, not because it’s valentine’s day’.
Depends on your definition of “need.” I think of a need as something that is vital to one’s survival. There may be a great desire to have romance in your live, but if you don’t need it. Hell, I haven’t had a real relationship in my 17 years of life. Although I would like to have romance in my life, it’s not nessasary to my existence.
