Every Feb. 14 arrives with the same confidence, dressed in red, trailing balloons, chocolate and the unmistakable belief that it is doing the Lord’s work.
It is not.
Valentine’s Day does not ask how you are doing. It does not check whether love is complicated this year or whether your heart is currently being held together by duct tape and habit. It simply arrives, demands participation and charges interest if you refuse.
There is no middle ground with Valentine’s Day. You are either publicly in love or privately defective. There is no room for nuance, no allowance for quiet affection, no respect for the people who love deeply but do not perform well on command.
For one day a year, affection becomes a receipt.
Flowers are no longer flowers; they are proof. Candy is no longer candy; it is currency. Dinner reservations are not about enjoying a meal together; they are about being seen enjoying a meal together.
Love is reduced to logistics, to spending brackets, to how much effort can be displayed in a six-hour window before life resumes.
If you are single, Valentine’s Day becomes an exercise in polite avoidance.
You smile at coworkers’ roses while silently negotiating with yourself about whether it is too early in the day to start pretending this is funny.
You tell yourself it is just another day while every advertisement within a 10-mile radius insists you are lying.
And if you are in a relationship that is struggling, Valentine’s Day is worse. It takes whatever hairline cracks already exist and presses its thumb into them.
It insists that one evening should fix what weeks of silence could not. It suggests that a card might succeed where listening failed.
This holiday is not about love. It is about reassurance. About the need to prove something to someone, loudly enough that doubt cannot interrupt the evening. It is a performance masquerading as intimacy.
Real love does not need a calendar reminder. It does not peak once a year and disappear by the 15th. It is found in ordinary moments, in quiet consistency, in choosing one another on days that do not come with balloons.
Valentine’s Day tells us that love must be grand to be valid. That if it is not wrapped, photographed or publicly acknowledged, it must not exist at all.
That is the lie.
So yes, Valentine’s Day misses the point, not because bitterness demands it, but because love deserves better than this annual charade. It deserves honesty instead of obligation and presence instead of presentation.
If love is real, it will survive without the spectacle. And if it is not, no amount of chocolate will save it.
