Not really about love, actually

Valentine’s Day. A day celebrating love. Girlfriends, wives, partners excited to be treated like princesses, pampered with gifts and meals. Then there are the ardent valentine-haters, who feel it deeply farcical to single out just one day on which to show your affection; enabling a capitalist profit is far from in the spirit of true love.

Every year I feel pressured to be on one side or the other. But the truth is that I see no sense in being Pro or Anti-Valentine. Too often the Pro-Valentiners aren’t Pro-Love, but Pro-Gifts, Pro-Self-Gain. Too often Anti-Valentiners aren’t Anti-Capitalism, but seemingly use their supposed ideals as a way to hide bitterness at never getting a Valentine’s card themselves. While Pro-Valentiners easily lose themselves in a sugar-dusted cloud of gifts and candlelight dinners, the Anti-Valentiners lose themselves in vitriol against this love-culture.

But wait a second. Are we still talking about love here? Is love the central issue in Valentine’s arguments? Can we really call the world we live in today reminiscent of a ‘love-culture’? It seems to me that we have been misled – and continue misleading ourselves – into concentrating on a day that elicits only the (unfortunately) abstract notions of love we harbour somewhere in our hearts.

This mechanical demonstration of love and its supposed importance in our lives does not come from a deep, emotionally intelligent core, but is a perversion of feeling. We keep our supposed ‘love’ in a straightjacket of intricate concepts, and do not act upon it. Valentine’s Day has become a day where we can drench ourselves in sentimentality in order to not have to open our eyes and have our hearts broken by that which remains.

We live in a world where love is still something highly valued, something we dedicate a day to; we celebrate love. Yet our planet is at the brink of destruction: oceans are poisoned by oil, deforestation eradicates 1.5 acres of rainforest a second, and 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. We pride ourselves on our sensitivity, especially on Valentine’s Day. But looking at the world, what have we, as a people, to say about love?

The sparkly cupid-filled Valentine’s cakes in Tesco are given as gifts of love, yet still made with eggs from hens suffering in torture chambers called chicken batteries. Mass produced bundles of red roses are sprayed with pesticides, polluting our earth. Happy Valentine’s Day?