I was surprised to see so many negative Valentine’s Day related posts on FaceBook and Twitter yesterday. I can certainly understand feeling lonely and even a little annoyed by it but I was single for several Valentine’s Days and I can’t recall ever being quite so bitter or angry. I certainly never felt the need to belittle my non-single friends over it. I guess that’s because I was always hopeful of finding someone special. I definitely had my days (weeks/months) of feeling down and lonely, wondering when the heck my luck would change but deep down I always knew it would. Or more like it had to considering how much bad luck I had there for a while. People would say “You’ll find someone when you stop looking” or tell me how they’d completely given up on dating and then they found their soul mate. I never really bought all that stuff because it just didn’t make sense to me. If I want something and believe I deserve it, why would I give up or stop looking for it? And if I stopped looking then how would I know when I found it? It was all very confusing to me.
I don’t know that I’ve ever come across a person who absolutely loved Valentine’s Day. It seems more like it’s just one of those rituals we put up with as part of being a person with emotions. Yes, it’s commercialized and a bit obligatory but look at how many things in our lives are that way. I saw a post that said something along the lines of: you should tell the people you care for that you love them every day so Valentine’s Day is for suckers. Of course we should do nice things for our loved ones every day and tell them how much we care but we don’t. Life gets in the way. So we’ve got Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and birthdays to remind us to make the time. I see Valentine’s Day similarly. And yes I do feel differently about it when I’m in a relationship than when I’m single but I think that’s normal too. Either way, it’s one day out of the year and it’s an excuse to eat endless amounts of candy. How could anyone be angry about that?
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