How many times have you heard words to the effect of “Valentines is consumerist bullshit” in the past week? Well I’m here to tell you that anyone who says that is basically the biggest hypocrite that ever walked the planet, opened their mouths and said something stupid.
Actually, perhaps I should amend that statement. If you’ve never worn a cheeky pair of ears whilst sipping a pint on Halloween, never in your life even sniffed a crème egg or woken up bleary-eyed on a cold December morning excited by the knowledge that a small present-shaped piece of Dairy Milk is hidden in what feels like a cardboard fortress at 6am (alright maybe I’m just bad at opening advent calendars) – then you are hereby exempt from my judgements if you think V-Day is total crap.
However, if you have in fact celebrated an event advertised in shops and on billboards by spending your good money on something in-keeping with festivities, then don’t go bitching about Valentine’s in some sort of holier-than-thou speech about how “love is so materialistic nowadays”. Everyone likes getting ‘stuff’. Would you like some stuff in a nice little box from someone you like? Yeah! Sure you would, because you like stuff and so does the rest of the human race.
Since the dawn of humanity, people have been rather happy and more inclined to love someone who gives them shit for free – think hunter, gatherer or about that David Attenborough show you watched a bit hung-over the other week where male birds showed off to potential mates their nest-building skills by getting lots of stuff to impress the female bird. Primal and animal instincts over the material aspect of love might sound a bit inapplicable today – if my partner buys me a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, I’m not going to suddenly start thinking they’d be a great family provider and protector (after growing up with a sibling, I’ve learnt to guard my own chocolate thanks).
Accept however, that people will like you more if you buy them something or make an extra special effort to show your affections and stop kidding yourself that you wouldn’t secretly like someone a teeny bit more if they actually got you tickets to that gig, or that signed shirt you’d do anything to have. Assigning a particular day to do all this is just part of the fun, like the run up to Christmas or that lovely anticipation you have coming downstairs on Easter Sunday to then find out that your Mum really did buy that massive £14.99 chocolate extravaganza you’d had your eye on in Sainsbury’s.
Consumerism is fun, and that’s all Valentine’s Day is really – it doesn’t have to be about anything serious nowadays (no woodwork carving required to show your manly and useful skills at errr… making cupboards in later life). So if you’re guilty of tweeting on your iPhone that people are “mindlessly following each other like sheep, walking into the capitalist jaws of Western civilisation”, then do yourself a favour – stop, reconsider and buy that person in your seminar you think is kinda cute a box of Malteasers. Worse that could happen is you ending up with a box of rejected chocs – yummy!