This Sunday is the holiday of love, which, ironically, so many people love to hate. Valentine’s Day tends to divide people into two camps: those who enjoy a day completely devoted to romance and mushy ardor, and those who are convinced it is a pathetic holiday contrived by Hallmark. I find myself somewhere in between the two. I don’t like to get caught up in the hype, and if you love someone you should treat them special more than one day a year. But I also find the concept of having a holiday simply devoted to love kind of sweet. It should be viewed like Thanksgiving: Yes, we should be thankful for family, friends and other blessings every day, but it is nice to take one day to truly acknowledge our gratefulness. In order to reconcile my opposing attitudes, I am going to propose some changes to how Valentine’s Day should be celebrated and renovate the holiday into something better.
I have a deep loathing of romantic comedies, and this is the prime time they are released. I would rather sit through an entire 12-hour Ken Burns documentary than be forced to see the cleverly titled movie “Valentine’s Day,” which opens Friday. My beef with rom-coms is that they are all the exact same. The formula tends to be some type of reiteration of boy and girl meet cute. Girl is probably wary about falling in love and boy is clueless that she is his soulmate. Shenanigans ensue, sassy fat sidekicks give advice and voila, in the end the two end up together forever. There, I have just saved you $10 and two hours of your life.
The next thing I would completely do away with is gift-giving. Small things &- flowers and chocolate, for example &- are fine, but nothing too big. The problem is Valentine’s Day gifts are never very good. Men assume they have to give their significant others something “romantic.” Apparently in man-speak, romantic translates to lingerie, a crappy piece of jewelry &- men generally have bad tastes in that department &- or a jumbo box of twisted pleasure Trojan condoms. Please, just stick with the truffles.
In the same vein as gifts, fancy restaurant dinners almost always turn out to be disappointing as well. Chefs know their restaurant is going to be jam-packed no matter what so they can create a shockingly over-priced menu with less-than-stellar entrees and people will still pay big bucks. This year at the Top of the Hub, the classy Prudential Center restaurant, the four-course Valentine’s Day prix fixe menu will set you and your sweetie back $500. In my opinion for that amount of money, they better serve Dodo bird eggs cooked over a cassoulet of white tiger and bald eagle meat simmered in a reduction of pure gold. I was severely disappointed when I saw the menu contained more typical fare such as salmon, duck and tomato bisque. Basically, dinner is going to be a rip-off ,and the restaurants are counting on you feeling like too much of an unromantic jerk to complain about the expense. Love, after all, is priceless, right?
My final gripe with Valentine’s Day is it is too focused on celebrating the romantic type of love. This is why most people without a significant other feel so bad on Feb. 14. Why not have this day be less exclusive and make it a celebration about love in general? Go and enjoy the evening with a best friend, a sibling or a parent. Love can be found in so many different forms, so why are we limiting ourselves to celebrating it in only one? For most of us, passionate and romantic love tends to be fleeting, but other kinds of it will last longer. I will have way more friends and family members than I ever will lovers, and my connection with them is much stronger, much less likely to break and something for which I am truly thankful. Everybody has some type of love in their lives, whether it is a love for your bros or a love for your mom, and everyone should be allowed to honor it.
This Valentine’s Day, I implore everyone to do away with the commercialist aspect of the holiday. Don’t waste money on predictable movies, icky gifts and over-priced prix fixe menus. It should also be an all-inclusive holiday to celebrate with whomever you love. There is only one requirement in order to enjoy this day, and it is summed up perfectly by The Beatles’ greatest lyric: “All you need is love.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
