Valentine's Day: Leave it or Love it?

So, Christmas is over. January is done. We’ve settled into a new year and after the festive mayhem we can, in February, finally relax. Right? Wrong. On February 14th Valentine will once again rear his saintly head and millions of people will go out and buy cards and maybe flowers and chocolates. Some may even splurge a load of cash on fancy restaurants. Men may flash their credit cards and buy expensive jewellery and maybe even diamond rings. Flower petals will be sprinkled in baths, a chorus of champagne corks will be heard popping across the nation, girls and boys will count their anonymous cards dropped lovingly into letterboxes all over the world and bedsprings will be put to the ultimate test.

I say this. I’m guessing at a lot of it as most of my friends won’t even admit to valuing the day at all. Ask anyone about Valentine’s Day and you’re met with stony-faced cynicism and well-rehearsed replies about how Valentine’s Day is nothing more than a money-making exercise designed to steal from the poor and give to the corporate rich. They’ll go on passionately about how you should show your love for someone everyday not just when Hallmark tells you to.

The non-believers are so vehement in their tirade against Valentine’s Day that I really believe they mean it. I’ve struggled to find anyone who’s willing to buy into it or who is, at least, willing to admit that they buy into it but some of them must be fibbing. There are 25 million people in the UK that send cards. Over half of the entire UK population spends approximately 1.3 billion British pounds in Valentine’s related way which means at least half of my friends are telling porkies. And, when you think about it, what actually is the problem with Valentine’s Day?

Ok, so I’ll admit it’s commercialized and it’s forced upon us and it gives people an opportunity to start ripping us off but isn’t that just like Christmas, and Easter and Halloween? I suspect that those who celebrate Valentine’s Day at the very least believe in love. When you compare this to those who celebrate Christmas, I’m not certain as many of them believe in God, a point perfectly illustrated when my two-year old nephew very sweetly said to the local vicar at the Christmas Eve carol service, “I know what Christmas is all about. It’s about the birth of Santa Claus.” Cue embarrassed shuffling from the family.

Does Valentine’s Day really deserve all this bullying? If you can, for one moment, ignore all those bellowing against it then think about this: I tell my fiancé I love him at least once a day but, in the midst of our hectic lives do I get the chance to make him feel special? Do I always have time to block out every other little mundane detail in our life and really make the time to sit down and exist completely in our own little love bubble? No, if I’m honest I don’t. Neither does he. And, neither does anyone else. Yes, we may have an opportunity to do it more than once a year, but if for some reason we don’t, then thank the lord for Valentine’s Day!

Look at it as a gift. It’s a day given to us to reassess. Just like Christmas day it provides us with an opportunity to stop and look at the person lying in bed next to them, or sitting opposite them at breakfast and remember all those feelings that existed between you before bills and mortgages and children and careers and everything else got in the way. Unlike Christmas day, it was excommunicated from the religious calendar back in 1969 so you don’t even have to feel any guilt or hypocrisy about sitting in a church (for the first time that year) celebrating it. You don’t need to spend a fortune on it; it doesn’t need to be grandiose and over-the-top because at the end of the day it’s about making time for each other and in this world that is something I get the chance to do less and less.

Its origins endear it to me even more. While it’s unclear exactly which early Christian martyr named Valentine (there were quite a few apparently) was being honoured with the celebration, it is clear that it was initially a religious festival. As with everything, the decline of religious belief means that hugely embroidered and often totally fabricated stories have emerged to underpin its non-religious existence. My favourite though is the tale that is most common in modern folklore.

Valentine was a priest in the days of Roman Emperor Claudius II. While everyone else was spilling blood in the coliseum, and building enormously successful roads and drainage systems, Valentine was working on a more benevolent and gentle cause: one in the name of love. Claudius II had decreed that all young men must remain single believing that a successful army and strong soldiers could not be made up of married men. While his logic is somewhat questionable, it was the law and that was that. But, behind the sexually frustrated scenes of the Roman army, Valentine was performing secret marriages allowing young men to marry their sweethearts. Now, I’d like to tell you that love won out and that Valentine showed Claudius II the error of his ways, but I’d be lying. As with most Roman stories, this one ends in jail and death but from his death sprung the beginnings of what we now know as Valentine’s Day – a celebration, all over the world, of the love that Valentine fought for. As to whether my tale is true…I don’t know. It could be a load of codswallop for all I know, but when has truth and logic ever mattered? Don’t even get me started on the Christmas story.

It would, of course, be impossible to discuss Valentine’s Day without discussing the impact it has on those without someone to share it with. In recent times, the day has developed it’s own alter ego and is known amongst those unattached as Singles Awareness Day. To my knowledge, those who are single deal with it in one of three ways. Either they gather all their friends together and have a good time regardless, or they sit in front of romantic movies and cry their socks off lamenting the lack of respective boy or girl or they ignore it altogether. To some extent it’s a case of greener grass. If there was a day celebrating singledom, you can bet your platinum wedding bands that attached people all over the world would secretly wish that they could be part of that, if only for the day.

At the end of the day, what harm does Valentine’s Day do? It’s not as if everyone dresses up as the undead and knocks on strangers’ doors begging for food only to mete out their own form of torturous punishment if, heaven forbid, they happen to have run out of sweets. It’s not also as if everyone ignores the lack of logic between chocolate bunnies and Jesus rising from the dead and eats themselves into a sugar-coloured stupor.

Valentine’s Day is simply about taking time to show someone that you love them. In some ways, that makes more sense to me than any other holiday. So, I’m standing up for Valentine’s Day and defending it in the face of cyncism and stoney-faced hostility. Plus, I’m a sucker for the underdog.

This article was first published in Sussex Local magazine www.sussexlocal.net