A Note on Valentine’s Day

Image: epSos.de

With Christmas and New Year behind us, it’s time for another Hallmark holiday: Valentine’s Day. Now Valentine’s Day seems to be a holiday which seems to provoke virulent reactions from many of us, perhaps more than any other day.

Couples love it, using it to shower each other with affection and sicken the rest of the world with their nauseating cuteness (unless one of the pair doesn’t believe in the holiday, in which case they will spend the day feeling smug for refusing to succumb to capitalism whilst their partner sulks). Singles generally hate it, and spend it either partying as hard as possible in an attempt to prove that they don’t need a partner to complete them, or sobbing into a carton of ice-cream so big that they could easily fall into it and be lost for ever. And then there’s those who resent it purely for being a Hallmark holiday, although many of these are probably singles looking for different excuse to hate the holiday or loved-up people who don’t want to fork out a fiver for a card with a teddy and some hearts on the front. Whatever your stance, you’re likely to fall into one of these three categories.

Except…what if you don’t? The fact that I’ve written this blog post may suggest otherwise, but I genuinely do not care about Valentine’s Day. Of course I notice it, but it seems to have taken over Facebook, Twitter and now Google in the last few hours, so I’d have to be fairly stupid not to. I am single (sometimes I even melodramatically exclaim that I am terminally so), but I feel not more depressed about this fact on Valentine’s Day than on any other day of the year. Nor do I begrudge the couples the chance to celebrate their together-ness. I’d rather they did it in the privacy of their own homes, but that’s more due to a fundamental dislike of PDAs than anything else (I slapped my first boyfriend for kissing me in McDonalds, enough said). Maybe this apathy is due to the fact that I went to an all-girls’ school, the kind where no-one even notices the opposite sex until the age of about fifteen, and therefore was never subjected to the humiliation of the Valentine’s card count. Or maybe I’m just strange.

So what will I be doing tonight? Not dating, not partying, and certainly not sobbing into a tub of ice-cream (I live in university halls, I have no freezer). No, my evening involves something far more depressing than Valentine’s Day. It’s called a dissertation. The joys of being in final year…