By Anna Ley

I grew up, as many of you have, celebrating Valentine’s Day. As a child, it was a bigger ordeal, what with parents and adults trying to instill the concept of “love” as a value, something to be spread and shared with the people in one’s life. In elementary school the Valentine’s tradition was to make each person in the class a valentine, which usually took the form of chopped paper hearts and glittery doilies with ‘happy valentimes day’ carefully written in waxy Crayon. I remember always picking out the best and biggest valentine’s that I had made for my best friends, and when February 14th arrived, the excitement of sharing these cards, and receiving one from each of my 20 classmates, was like the overwhelming excitement of unwrapping birthday presents. Walking around with our clumsy watercolor paper envelopes and our hands peeling with Elmer’s glue, this holiday took on the magic of any other. It was a day to give and receive cards, which, on a grader scale of reciprocity, is the pattern that love takes the form of too. 

It was not until later that I was confronted with other forms of Valentine’s Day traditions. As an eighth grader, I was intimidated, to say the least. While childhood celebration of Valentine’s Day had been freeing and all-inclusive, adolescent projections of valentine’s traditions demanded the foreign concept of a significant other. All of a sudden, Valentine’s day was not a holiday in which my parents helped me craft ornate tokens of love. No, it was a big occasion to discuss who-likes-who, often with much unprecedented emotional turmoil. It was a day invoking panic around whether or not the guy who just wouldn’t stop liking me would confess his love. It was a day to be jealous of the fact that my crush just gave my best friend a heart-shaped eraser and ignored me at lunch. I sincerely cannot pinpoint when and how Valentine’s Day became so romanticized to me, all I know is that its outcomes were so much less than the romantic eye-contact and the bold mutual acknowledgement of my Valentine’s Day fantasies. I remember liking a quiet boy in my class, who I thought was super cool because he did parkour. But I was shy too and didn’t know how to show him I liked him, so I just watched him. My infatuation with parkour boy deterred any sort of appreciation of various things I was given by admirers– one boy from my class gave me a handmade shell necklace and in a panic I told him I didn’t like him, right then and there (which horrifies me to even think about since in retrospect I can see how genuinely sweet it was for him to make that for me, though I must have subconsciously realized its value as a token of admiration since I still have it tucked in my duct tape bound time capsule). So you see, Valentine’s Day transitioned from being a holiday full of carefree elation to a day associated with unrealistic expectations that manifested awkward situations. Despite the fantasies of my youth– the sort of day dream that would involve parkour boy finding me in a game of sardines, and hiding with me close behind the bush by the lakeshore, and the whole game would melt away as we looked at each other, and then we would kiss on the grass– that sort, the actual tangible reality of being someone in a relationship or in any intimate way was out of the question. I loved the idea of romance and would spend nights in bed thinking blissful thoughts about the person I liked at school, but I lacked any awareness of how a relationship was supposed to look, as well as the true desire to make anything happen. This was the beginning of puberty, when the basics of good communication were still unrefined and when the age of awkward Valentine’s Days persisted. 

It was not until I had my first boyfriend, in the winter of Junior year of high school, which Valentine’s Day redeemed itself to neutrality. I was lucky that my first relationship was one of deep love. I never had done the ‘talking to’ people or engaged in having ‘things’ with people like my peers had, but when I met this boy at summer camp, I dove into the deep end. Our first Valentine’s day together reinforced how similarly we thought: “I’ve never really thought of Valentine’s day as being that big of a deal, just kind of a Hallmark holiday…” To both of our relief, neither one of us expected the conventional flowers, chocolates, or teddy bears. We thought of it like any other day, but perhaps threw in a special love note, which was not a rarity in our relationship. But it was not Valentine’s Day that became special again to me, it was just him that made it elevated, as being with him made everything more vibrant at the time. Now, I sometimes think that I am so young, a twenty year old, reminiscing on a true love that has come and passed. Have I been gypped with getting the love of my life so young? It is a privilege, but also a nagging fear until I fall in love again, if I do. 

In the years that followed this relationship, I went into deep thought about various philosophies of love, which is a story for another essay. That is to say, I started to see Valentine’s Day as not a true expression of deep love, but a perfect demonstration of the consumptive nature of culture in the United States. How could a holiday that  stands for something so special, the intimate love between humans, be standardized and diminished to cookie-cutter Hallmark cards, sweat-shop synthetic stuffed animals, exploitative and toxin-filled chocolates, and sickeningly sweet aesthetics? As in middle school, I began to resent Valentine’s Day as a whole. I missed my love and the wild creative ways we came up with to give love to each other. What I really resented, and still despise, is that capitalist version of Valentine’s Day. Sure, it can be fun, but in a capitalist economy, “love” is promoted for the sole purpose of raising profits. Once upon a time, people figured out that the idea of “love” could be harnessed to make money, similar to other human necessities such as health and happiness, with the help of mass advertising and popular conviction. Thus, the power to define representations of love has been monopolized and seized by the wealthy Valentine’s Day industry. It feels sacreligious to treat the most powerful human emotion in that way, as a means to fulfill greed and exploitative motives. 

Though I do not know the history of Valentine’s Day, and I have conscientiously written this essay in an ignorant state, it is clear to me that the original notions of Valentine’s Day have been separated from the current Valentine’s Day social expectations. From my understanding, Valentine’s Day is a day to express gratitude and love for people in one’s life. Valentine’s Day, as we see it presented in Walmart and Safeway on balloons and in frosting, cannot promote true depth of love because it promises love out of consumerism, which is psychologically preposterous and deceptive. By no means can the Valentine’s Day industry diminish true love already in existence, but it presents love as deficient without its uniform and ubiquitous merchandise.

I know this essay must paint me in a light of the grouchy troll who resents modernity, and that sentiment is not wholly incorrect. I do, though, want to be understood as someone who is actually optimistic. The reason I have suggested this hilarity of the Valentine’s Day industry is because I value and see true deep love all around me. I feel the light of love in union and caring of communities I’m a part of and in the decisions I make and see others make. I believe that love persists and will always persist. That said, my vision of Valentine’s Day, while being more complex than my original infantile excitement, has come full circle. I once again view this day as a time to give and receive love to those I care about, as many of them as possible, because what a good excuse to do so!  And rather than hyperfocusing on a lover, in this space of singleness I can swoop in with surprises for unsuspecting friends and roommates and family members. The truth is, that my view of Valentine’s Day is ever-evolving with my growth, and with the changes of the world.