February Fourteenth

Valentine’s Day gets to you different when you’re alone. Not in some romantic, wistful way. The actual depression numbers spike harder on February 14th than they do on Christmas, than your birthday, than any other day someone decided meant something. It’s engineered to make you feel what’s missing.

The whole thing is a commercial operation. Flowers, dinner reservations marked up fifty percent, jewelry designed to trigger desire to prove something. Greeting cards. If you’re not participating—if you’re solo or indifferent or just broke—the culture keeps nudging you that you’re fucking it up.

I’ve seen the responses. Contests: Win a date with someone from the site. It’s pathetic in a specific way—selling the idea that what you need is company, that loneliness is something you win your way out of. But it’s also honest. The machinery briefly admits what it does: it sells the belief that you need another person to feel okay on a particular day.

The actual thing is simpler and worse. Valentine’s Day just sucks when you’re alone. Not because of the day—the day is nothing, it’s one day out of 365—but because of what everyone’s decided it means. You can’t argue with a culture. You just find something that doesn’t rub it in and wait for it to be over.