PHOTO COURTESY OF MACSHIELD.COM

Illustration depicts a band-aid mending a broken heart

Valentine’s Day deserves its flowers, but only because it is the worst of the worst. Excluding not widely celebrated holidays, Valentine’s Day is by far the dumbest one.

We celebrate big holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, but there is nothing big about Valentine’s day. At least these other holidays have meaning behind them. What is there for Valentine’s day? A day where you are morally obligated to treat your partner well?

There are many reasons why Valentine’s Day is the worst holiday of all, but I’ll start with my biggest gripe and annoyance about this day: Stop posting your significant other. 

Nobody cares that you have a significant other, so stop posting them 100 times on your Instagram or Snapchat stories for a single holiday. Save that for their birthday or y’all’s anniversary. Your followers don’t care unless they’re family members, and even then, probably not as much as you’d think.

If you are so inclined to post them for Valentine’s Day, keep it to one slide. I don’t need to see a whole collage of cheesy photos of you together and have to spend my entire day skipping through them.

There’s absolutely zero reason for couples to post photos of themselves three times a year. Twice is enough, unless you’re celebrating an achievement, like a milestone anniversary. 

Which brings me to my next point: a single day in February shouldn’t be the reason you show your significant other that you love and care for them. You should be doing that every day, not just because a calendar tells you to. 

Gifts and acts should be spontaneous.

Yes, you could easily use that argument for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, but I see far less about those days than Valentine’s Day. And those people in your life deserve the flowers and gifts for raising you and being there for you.

Speaking of flowers, if your significant other can only think of flowers, chocolates and a stuffed animal from Build-A-Bear to get you on this day of love and appreciation, that just proves my point: Valentine’s Day is just a “because I have to” holiday. 

Also, flowers are the dumbest gift known to man. They look pretty for less than a week, die, and are of no substance. Switch the flowers for something purposeful that can be used; even chocolate is a better, more useful alternative. 

Choosing any gift in itself is stressful. Valentine’s Day can be a lot of pressure, especially for people in relationships, who feel pressured to plan the perfect day because that’s what society expects. That’s what movies, social media and the world have built: an impossible expectation of February 14. 

Now, for singles, Valentine’s Day is an annoyance, obviously, because the more posts that come across social media, the more they feel left out, like they’re missing something they’re supposed to be part of, because it’s all anyone will post about on that day. 

Valentine’s Day feels like a day that’s forced upon people. A holiday that, in reality, is not even that great.

Restaurants are crowded, gifts become expensive, love becomes a stressful competition and it’s all really performative. 

Let’s normalize skipping Valentine’s Day and show that we love those who we care about every day of the year, not just February 14. 

Categories: Opinion