It begins, like so much, at the inbox: email blasts from a certain corporate monolith whose NYSE listing might as well stand for Central Valentine Systems.
As delightful as it always is to get an hourly email from CVS — whether they’re reminding you that it’s cold and flu season or wondering if you might need some “16x20 Photo Canvas and Wall Tiles” — it’s at this time of year that their logo glows a brighter, more irradiated red, that the brand blooms into the fullest expression of itself.
This is when the message bots start blasting the caps-abusing call-out “LOVE is In The AIR" and the store windows blaze with metallic reds and silvers. This is when that matrix of sterile fluorescence and sticky gray carpets, of hyper-emotive Muzak and numbed-out staff, reveals itself as the dark heart of Valentine’s Day itself.
Although the heart symbol has only been in CVS’s logo since 2014, I think we can agree that its appearance represents the final slip of the mask, the revelation of a decades-old alliance between useless commercial trinkets and the hidden architects of our calendar. Design company Siegel+Gale may say that CVS’s logo “represents the brand’s values of integrity, caring, collaboration, innovation, and accountability,” by using “the teardrop shape and the Helvetica Neue typeface.” But we know in our bones that this bright, angular, machine-stamped symbol represents the bloodless heart of late-capitalism. A hollow avatar of love and care, a teardrop-shaped red gaslight. (No, I’m not posting it here. You ain’t getting me, you automated pharmacy assassin drones.)
Ok. I admit that I write this with a sinking sense of penning my own diagnostic psych eval — adding one more tile to the mosaic of sociopathology that I sometimes fear Sleeveen will become. But if this sounds too much like Crank’s Corner or the b-plot of “Sex and the City” — if not one of Carrie Bradshaw’s actual columns — I should make clear that the enemy here is not love, romance, sex, friendship, or whatever human experience Big Valentine claims to represent.
It’s the queasy, cringey transactions the holiday forces upon the more defenseless members of society. Members like the single, the married, the committed, the divorced, the widowed, the childless, and the child.
For decades I’ve wondered if any life stage or relationship status actually benefits from the annual romantic audit V-Day imposes. Or from the compulsory purchase of chocolates, candy, roses, or cards at penalty of seeming insufficiently devoted, prematurely devoted, or excessively, unwelcomely devoted to another.
It’s worth asking ourselves what historic devolution led us to seven-year-old kids exchanging candy hearts with archaic come-ons like “hubba-hubba.” Or why we have a holiday that offers slightly older kids the same opportunity for social suicide that prom does, prompting lower-status daydreamers a public venue for disastrous declarations, as if Valentine’s Day were like the wedding day of a mafia don’s daughter when every request must be granted.
I’m no historian, but my own research definitely hasn’t unearthed any compelling reason for this pink nightmare to persist.
I’ll spare you the usual sketchy Middles Ages-through-Enlightenment history that media tends to rehearse this time of year — the 15th century duke who sent his wife love letters from the Tower of London, the heart-shaped missives exchanged by Elizabethan courtesans, the soapy courtly love celebrated in art like certain kitschy art.
The known story begins in the early 20th-century, when American greeting cards entered mass production, “love” and “romance” became acceptably commodified, and the holiday became a great capitalist grab bag of signs and signifiers from ancient Rome, Elizabethan and Victorian England, Pop Art, Madison Avenue, and the emoji-verse.
But in doing so, Big Valentine erected a vast, tacky edifice on ground that turns out to be not just shaky but riven by a deep psychic fissure. In fact, the earliest and most likely origin of this mid-winter ritual — an unresolvable clash of Eros and Thanatos — feels scripted by Freud himself.
From what I can tell, the Catholic Church recognizes several saints named Valentine, none of whom were canonized for being great lovers or slick with construction paper but for the usual Late-Roman Empire reason of Driving While Christian and getting beheaded. Some records have Emperor Claudius II executing two men named Valentine on Feb. 14 in different years of the Third Century, queueing up a St. Valentine’s Day that would prove handy two centuries later.
In the Fifth Century, Pope Gelasius did to a crunk Roman February fertility bash what the Church also did to Winter Solstice: planting a big Papal thumb on a pagan festival to declare it a Holy Day. This kind of sublimating forced marriage actually worked out pretty well in the case of Christmas, which survives as a dark, warm, spooky season of ghosts, gifts, roistering, enfolded with an invitation to contemplate the Divine on Earth.
But no one should expect the same from a holiday that derives from, on the one hand, a state-sanctioned murder and, on the other, a drunk, naked, S&M-tinged fertility orgy with the filthy-as-hell name Lupercalia.
Nothing chaste or courtly about this mid-February holiday. Lupercalia was, Yale religious studies prof Noel Lenski told NPR, a days-long festival at which young men would sacrifice a goat and dog then use the animals’ skins to whip young women in order to make them fertile. After this, the lads would draw names of lassies from an urn and the luck-paired couples were expected to spend the rest of the festival doing what Poor Things ingénue Bella refers to as “furious jumping.” Think about this the next time you make your 10-year-old give a candy heart to her cute classmate.
I can’t claim that I owe all my discomfort around V-Day to a return of the repressed, but you have to admit this general gear-grinding clash of Protestant Work Ethic and repressed satyrism does feels very House of Representatives 2023. Our culture specializes in morphing and retconning historical ironies, and many feel that, however cringey, the widespread appeal of Valentine’s Day is its own defense.
“This isn't a command performance,” Rutgers sociologist Helen Fisher told NPR in the aforementioned piece from 2022. “If people didn’t want to buy Hallmark cards, they would not be bought, and Hallmark would go out of business.”
Yeah, sure. But it’s worth asking how things tend to go for people who don’t buy Hallmark cards, get their new squeeze some roses, or take their situationship out to dinner on the night that restaurants charge double. If the fallacies behind statements like Fisher’s aren’t obvious — the redeeming wisdom of the market, the self-justifying logic of tradition — consider what enforces this supposedly non-command performance.
In a less tolerant and diverse society, they called someone who publicly abstains from Christmas either “Scrooge” or some straight-up ethnic slur. What do we call someone who publicly abstains from a holiday dedicated to love itself?
“Poor” is one option, since the National Retail Federation predicts Americans will spend $25.8 billion, or $185.81 each — proving that while money can’t buy love, it can buy objects meant to represent it, on a specific national holiday dedicated not to a holy day, historical figure, special person in your life, or event in our nation’s history but to “loooove” itself. A holiday that turns everyone into a contestant of “The Bachelor.”
The good news: you can conscientiously object. As the great advice columnist Dan Savage passingly said on his recent “Savage Love” podcast: “Roses are red…and stupid, and a waste of money.” This, in one of the more grounded, pro-love media entities I’m aware of. In fact, Savage’s all-embracing empathy and encouragement to the non-conforming seems a decent model for negotiating this matter of taste and inclination.
I’m sure that there are plenty of people older than grade-school age who just can’t wait for Valentine’s Day. If you’re one of them, feckin’ ay, hellyes, enjoy. And since I sense the spirit of Prince operating somewhere in this mix, I can’t dismiss the enterprise entirely. I can’t prove that Valentine’s Day is worse than, say, Mother’s or Father’s Day or any artificial holiday with good intentions that leaves some of us feeling weird, confused, or sad. I don’t expect everyone who reads this to join the Valentine’s Resistance.
After all, pointless, curmudgeonly gestures still exact a human cost. To say, even quietly, “I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day” is to sound like an uncle at Thanksgiving going on about why he refuses to tip. Which is why, if we want help give right-wing media a new holiday-centered moral panic to replace the War on Christmas, drastic measures may be in order.
We may have to start telling our partners and family members we love them every day. We may have to give them tokens of our esteem throughout the year. We may have to become insufferably loving, tiresomely affectionate – knowing that our kids may grow to resent us, that our sweet nothings may fall on deaf ears. This struggle may call for real heroes. For people willing to become a cloying, adoring blob of protoplasm 364 days a year.
It’s tough, but this is the bargain. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
On the other hand, if you want to hear from people working on real causes, like democracy, get thee to The.Ink, where my comrade Mike Berk is assisting journalist and author Anand Giridharadas in providing commentary and resources for giving a shit and acting in these insanely troubled times.
I’ll be back at you in a few days with something more substantial, but I warn you: don’t expect a card next Wednesday; doesn’t mean I love you any less.