Ye Olde Day of the Sainte Valentine

As I'm sure all of you have realized at some point, Valentine's Day is tomorrow. If you didn't know that, I'd seriously recommend your going to a store - now - and getting your significant other something. If you don't have one, congratulations! Your Valentine's Day is officially stress-free! Well, okay, I suppose you could get stressed about your lack of relationships or whether or not you'll get laid tonight after attempting to pick up a drunk and depressed single girl at a bar, but really, you have nothing to officially worry about. And you are very, very lucky.

Why is Valentine's Day stressful? It's supposed to be all fun and fluffy and filled with puppies and hearts and chocolate and all that fun stuff. Valentine's Day is supposed to be like how it was in elementary school: everyone makes a sweet valentine bag for their desk, composed of a paper bag, doilies, and stickers that takes all day to create, and then at the end of the day, everyone hands out those little Winnie the Pooh or Little Merrmaid valentines to everyone in the class with candy taped to them. Nobody loses! The teacher doesn't have to teach, the kids don't have to learn, everyone gets to feast on candy...there is absolutely nothing that is bad about this holiday. You don't have to worry about having a significant other or getting laid, you don't have to worry about what you'll cook for your romantic Valentine's dinner, you don't even have to worry about what to wear - your mom picked you out that awesome red sweatshirt with the teddy bears and hearts all over it. So what happens between first grade and college?

First, hormones: those evil little bastards that, for some reason, make you not want to be alone on February 14. The rest of the days of the year don't seem like as big of a deal; Christmas is great because you don't have to buy your significant other a present, so money is saved, you don't have to meet their family, so you don't have to worry about the painful awkwardness of meeting an entire extended family in the course of ten minutes, and you can spend it with your friends and do fun gift exchanges. Halloween is just fine, because you get to spend it with your friends, and you don't have to feel guilty when you go to a party dressed like a complete whore. However, Valentine's Day, for some reason, absolutely cannot be spent alone after age 13 (I realized, oddly, that I actually have not spent a Valentine's Day single since then, myself).

Another factor in the V-day equasion is peers. You can't help but look around your school on the fluffiest of all days and see all the happy canoodling couples and wish that you had one of those around your neck, too. Your friends all have boyfriends, so why don't you? To battle this depressing fact, it usually ends up that all the single friends get together and have some sort of gathering. The party of single people is fun to a point; however, it inevitably turns into a giant rant about how stupid Valentine's Day is, then once the anger abates, morphs into a giant depressed-fest of why they don't have a significant other, and then to how their life sucks. It's a gigantic downward spiral, created only with the intention of celebrating their solitude...which never, ever ends well. The college version of this, of course, is the venture out to the bars. The girls will get together, get dressed up all cutely, and head to a venue of choice to get drunk and celebrate their singleness. This is usually a horrible cover of their sadness over their lack of boyfriend, so they drink themselves into a depressed stupor and go home with the first guy that looks their way. February 15 is rarely a fun day for these girls.

Then there's the actual having a significant other for Valentine's Day, which can't exactly be classified as fun, either. There's the issue of selecting gifts; should I get them something cute? What about something naughty? What about jewelry? Should I just cook them dinner? From there, there's the actual "What are we going to do for Valentine's Day?" discussion. Dinner and a movie is overdone and lame (and usually a cop-out); one party making dinner can be fun, but also extremely stressful. There's the menu selection (do they like steak or seafood? What kind of side dish should I make?), then there's the actual preparation of it. In theory, this meal should be easy, right? Wrong. It never, ever goes well. For whatever reason, there's some sort of guarantee that whatever you make will turn out terribly, and you'll end up running to the grocery store last minute to buy some microwave lasagnes to throw together and say you spent all day cooking. There's also the time budget issue: you have to cook, but then you have to get dressed! And what to wear? All of this is particularly stressful if this happens to be a brand new relationship, because you don't want to make yourself look like a fool right off the bat. However, once you've been dating for a long time, Valentine's Day is just a hassle. It's not like you have to impress them anymore, right? It just becomes some lame excuse to spend more money on each other.

When it all comes down to it, Valentine's Day is overrated once you're over the age of 10. You start to care who gives you candy and what kind of little valentine you get from them, and you start to become aware that really, this holiday kind of sucks. My solution? Let's all go back to elementary school.

Look at 1:48:


The End.