OPINION: Don’t ask me to be your valentine

About 1 billion Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged each year. This makes it the second largest seasonal card sending time of the year. (Al404/ Creative Commons)

Valentine’s Day literally sucks. The overpriced chocolate and oversized teddy bears really just take something beautiful and turn into something really superficial.

Don’t get me wrong I love love. Relationships are a beautiful thing but they should not be glorified or profited from, which is exactly what Valentines day seems to be—all in the name of St. Valentine.

The history of Valentine’s Day originated with the Catholic Church and a priest known as St.Valentine who served during the third century in Rome when Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers. When Claudius outlawed marriage, Valentine felt it wasn’t right and defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered him to be killed.

Its also known that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to celebrate Valentine’s death or burial but others claim that the Christian church decided to place St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia.

Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine’s Day but it wasn’t till much later that the day became definitively associated with love. It was commonly believed in France and England during the Middle Ages that February 14 was the beginning of birds’ mating season, adding to the notion that it should be a day for romance.

Now we have taken this day and shoved it into boxes of chocolates and giant stuffed bears. How romantic.

Then it also becomes another day to remind the single they’re single. It’s a holiday that in an essences excludes a huge part of the population.

I think we had it down in elementary school. You had a class of 32 and you make 32 Valentines and everyone goes home with 32 Valentines. Were all in this together.

And why are we engraved since childhood to believe that this day is somehow vitally important and needs to be celebrated yearly. The whole day is based off Valentines death. Its basically a mourning day.

It’s not a happy day but people keep spending billions and billions each year on this day to get laid. It’s amazing what a bouquet of roses will do to a woman heart.

Go on though. Keep buying that red lingerie and bottles of champagne in the middle of February. Let’s make a toast to illegal marriage and death.

Photo used by CC BY-SA 2.0

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