Pink hearts, red roses, chocolate boxes, and massive amounts of stress. Welcome to the holiday we call “Valentine’s Day.”
Singles hate it. Couples hate it. Everyone hates it. Celebrating such a holiday that puts so much unnecessary pressure on everyone involved only makes people resent it more.
For single people, it’s been deemed “Single’s Awareness Day,” sometimes referred to by its acronym: SAD. It’s a big honking reminder that these people are unattached and (for the most part) lonesome and looking. No amount of comfort food and sad Taylor Swift songs can ease the feeling of loneliness.
For members of couples, the pressures of gift-buying and date-planning can get overwhelming. Purchasing gifts for a significant other is never an easy task, be it around the holiday season in December, a birthday, or, in this case, Valentine’s Day, especially since around Valentine’s Day there’s the added demands to be “romantic.”
Girls are really the ones who feel the pressures of V-Day. Boys are much more difficult to buy gifts for, since they generally don’t enjoy the standard flowers-and-chocolate nearly as much as their female counterparts. Similarly, they are the ones who expect the most out of this “special” day.
Many boys denounce the holiday completely. Since they do not wish to appear “whipped” or, God forbid, “romantic,” they avoid showing excitement and prefer for the day to remain anticlimactic. Mostly they participate in the celebration because they feel forced.
WARNING: When a girl says she doesn’t want a gift for Valentine’s Day, for the most part, she is lying. Girls tend to want to sound cool, calm, and collected when it comes to the Day of Stress, and will try to alleviate the pressure. Girls overanalyze everything, though, so feel out the situation and make sure that a gift is actually not necessary.
However, if you say that you don’t want a gift for Valentine’s Day, your significant other won’t know if you mean you actually don’t want a gift or if you’re just being nice. If you say no gifts, mean it. If you don’t mean it, don’t say it.
The problems circulating around Valentine’s Day all boil down to the differences in relationship roles: one person over analyzes everything and implies things he or she won’t actually say, and one person tends to overlook the signs because he or she interprets everything literally.
It’s a popular day for relationships to end, probably because of all the pressure and miscommunication that looms around February 14. To lessen the stressin’, try to just relax and enjoy the day.
