It's the most manufactured of all the special days we have, and yet probably one of the most celebrated. Valentine's day is that special date on which we all come together and declare our undying love for crass consumerism. The embodiment of our post-modern, capitalist society can be found in almost every place on February the 14th.
Okay, it's actually the 15th today, and (since I'm writing this with my nosey-ass brother looking over my shoulder which is considerably slowing the process by necessitating my punching him in the face if he does it once more) it may well be the 16th by the time you read it, but I'm not waiting another 363 days to get this written. I've got the topic and the motivation, timing can hit the bricks.
Anyways, Valentine's Day is often considered a couples' day, hence its often being misspelled as Valentines Day, the plural taking the place of the possessive to imply it is the day for you and your "Valentine" (perhaps the Americanism I most despise), rather than a celebration of St. Valentine. Point is, if you're single, society takes this opportunity to look down its collective nose at you.
But society is missing the point. The one thing this "holiday" is about (apart from gift companies having needed something to tide them over between Christmas and Easter) is people in love. This does not preclude couples, obviously, but equally does not exclude those not in a relationship.
Now, I'd love to be the sort of blogger who does a little research and sprinkles my 1500 words with a light dusting of facts but I'm just going to go with what I (and the rest of you, I'm sure) learnt in primary school and hope for the best, despite the fact that, when you can remember it, most of what you learn in primary school turns out to have been little more than unadulterated bollocks.
Well, here goes: according to every teacher I had from year 1 to year 6 (and sitcom How I Met Your Mother), St. Valentine was a priest/monk who married people in a time when some crazy Emperor dude had outlawed marriage. This guy was a supporter of a kind of love that, at the time, was not allowed. If anything, this guy now bears more significance for some single people in today's society.
No kind of love between two people is out of bounds in the modern world. As we prepare to make gay marriage legal in the UK, we've gone about as far as we can go in making every expression of love available to every person. But, nearly everyone has experienced the pang of a one-way love and that, I feel, is the kind of love that, whilst it is legal, is nevertheless not allowed today. While this kind of love can become reciprocal, it is far more likely that it is stamped out. We either bar ourselves from love by failing to act on such feelings or we act and are rebuffed, neither stops us from loving but in either case it is almost a fact of nature that we will be encouraged to stop, to give up, to move on. This is what I mean by not allowed.
See how those of us who are one half of a potential relationship which will never come to fruition are told we should not be allowed? We, the least obtrusive of alternative loves, are forever told we are unworthy of use of the term. Valentine is our saint now, we are the outlaws. We don't ask to secretly wed, we know the impossibility of such a thing, when we have no-one to be wed to, we ask merely that we be allowed to love, silently, from afar.
That's what February the 14th used to be about. Remember when you first heard the primary school version of the story of St. Valentine? Remember the card to the girl whose desk was a couple of rows over from yours? Often anonymous but sometimes signed, though only by the bravest of the brave. That's the only time this most sterilised, monetised of saint's days meant anything, when it was the chance for us all to take that flame we'd been holding (usually in a safety lamp with all the flaps shut so that no-one could see it) and use it to light the windows of our hearts.
I fail to see why grown-up Valentine's Day should be any different.
