Perhaps belatedly, I’ve come to the conclusion that Valentine’s Day makes us all exceptionally stupid.

Looking back on my personal history with the holiday, I see one clear trend emerging: namely, that I’m never satisfied with how the day goes. There are a variety of reasons:

  • My senior year of high school, I was somewhat unsettled by the fact that the exchange of gifts between me and my then-significant-other was horribly unbalanced — I bought him a copy of the first PostSecret book, with hideously embarrassing personal notes pushed between the pages; he bought me a Burberry scarf.
  • My freshman year of college, my dinner plans for the evening ended at a Starbucks, with my date telling me that he had to go attend to a friend who was, apparently, having a huge emotional crisis. Valentine’s Day ended at 8.45pm. It occurs to me now that he may have been using the friend’s-emotional-crisis-to-escape-from-a-date routine that I’ve now perfected, and that I should have read the signs and seen that breakup coming from a mile away.
  • Every other year in recent memory, I’ve celebrated the holiday by watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and setting my status on every social networking site possible to “Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.” Unending bitterness, needless to say, doesn’t leave a particularly good taste in one’s mouth.

This year, having discussed the issue with the relevant individual and concluded that neither of us want to do anything outrageous to mark the passing of an artificial holiday, I think I’ll largely be exempt from the indignities of the Valentine’s experience. But, I’m still faced with a few conflicting feelings about the subject:

First, no matter how much I want to reject the Valentine’s Day florist-Godiva-Hallmark complex, I’ve been conditioned to desire all the commercialized bullshit that goes with this holiday. As someone who doesn’t at all understand the appeal of cut flowers (they always strike me as kind of morbid), I still have a totally undiminished, primal, almost subconscious desire to receive flowers. Or a teddy bear with tacky accessories. Or a box of chocolates that I’m allergic to that will sit idle on a shelf until, inevitably, my sister sees and eats them without my knowledge.

Moreover, my desire to participate in the Valentine’s establishment hasn’t at all gone away. Even after agreeing not to make a big deal out of Valentine’s Day with The Guy, I found myself browsing a bunch of online florists last night, irrationally looking to buy flowers for my female Valentine, back at Swarthmore. (Clearly, the disadvantage of being gay is that, even when you’re partnered off, you’re still feel compelled to provide surrogate partnership to any number of women who desire it. All the single ladies, now put your gays up.)

This, of course, underscores the commercial absurdity that is flowers on Valentine’s Day. Even the least expensive bouquet of roses or tulips — clocking in at $30, mind you, so we’re not dealing with particularly cheap shit to begin with — somehow turns into a $65 monstrosity, once you factor in delivery and handling charges. The part of Valentine’s Day that seems the most legitimate to me — making a friend happy by surprising her with flowers — has been rendered fiscally impossible by writ of outright price gouging on the part of florists.

And then, of course, there’s the emotional flip-side of Valentine’s Day. As someone who happens to not be single this year, I’m blessedly unaffected by most of it, but I can’t help but stand back and watch the wreckage as it unfolds on Facebook. I’ve seen no less than six different invitations circulate for “traffic light” parties — or, for people who don’t subscribe to color-coded theories of sexuality, parties where one indicates their overall level of sexual permissiveness by wearing a particular color (red: prude and/or supportive friend; yellow: slut after a few drinks but wants the option to be quasi-embarrassed the next day; green: unabashed whore). The number of “…is now listed as ‘Single’” items in my News Feed has skyrocketed in the last week, as have the “…is now listed as ‘In a Relationship’” posts.

As OkCupid tweeted a few weeks ago,

Valentine’s Day is coming up. Do you love it, hate it, or grab the nearest member of your preferred sex just so you’ll have someone to hang out with?

We’re, seemingly, denied the option of completely ignoring Valentine’s Day. Rejecting Valentine’s Day falls into either the pattern of bitterly watching relationship-themed movies and eating cookie dough by one’s self, or having casual sex to, in the words of Peaches, fuck the pain away. Embracing it leads to inevitable disappointment.

And so, I have to ask again: what is it about Valentine’s Day that makes otherwise reasonable people so colossally stupid?