Valentine's can be just another day

By Julia Herman

Valentine's Day is coming, lurking on the periphery of the community consciousness.

They're selling those heart-shaped candy boxes down at the Cellar Market, and when I went to Target, the store was bedecked in pink and red reminders not, under any circumstances, to forget your significant other, your friends or your dog/cat on this occasion of love and egregious amounts of sugar.

At first I felt vaguely uneasy. Partaking in the festivity just reminds me of the awkwardness I felt in elementary school when the teachers told us we were going to have a Valentine's Day party.

We were required to bring cards for all students, regardless of our personal relationship with them. When you are ten years old, handing out cards to the kids in your class that you dislike or do not know is downright uncomfortable.    

After the awkward memories subsided, I decided I disapproved. My feelings of embarrassment would bring nothing good from the experience. But in order to channel my disaproval into a coherent article, I had to figure out precisely why Valentine's Day was so bad.

I considered ranting against crass commercialism. It frustrates anyone's principles of social justice to say, "Here is a holiday that you must celebrate solely by committing wanton acts of lavish extravagance.

"Eat chocolate manufactured by slave labor! Buy flowers grown in impoverished South American countries! Show your love with a diamond from war-torn Africa!" However this seemed too over played and talked out.  I needed something new.  

I considered expressing my disturbance with the shift from religious to secular. Valentine's Day is a Catholic saint's day, a day of martyrs and holy men with tenuously recorded histories even within their own tradition. Why should we co-opt the day of little-known holy men for worldly, often even downright carnal, amusements?

But I do not wish to resort to clichés. These arguments apply to most holidays, and social commentators have rhetorically beaten them to death.

Valentine's Day, I have discovered, is uniquely silly among holidays for a different reason.

Consider for a moment a hypothetical college-aged couple. Let us call them Jim and Jane. They like one another quite a lot, but Jane sometimes finds Jim inconsiderate.

He forgets things; he is late. Valentine's Day rolls around, and Jim forgets that too. Their lover's quarrel becomes an all-out battle, and Valentine's Day is the rallying cry. Perhaps their relationship survives; perhaps it disintegrates.

Or we can see Jim and Jane in a parallel universe: they do not like one another much at all, but they discovered this only after they started dating.

They fight and make up in cycles, but Jim has seen the light at the end of the tunnel — Valentine's Day! He believes making Jane happy will stop the fighting and salvage the situation. $200 later, Jane is happy, until Jim spends too much time playing Halo again and they break up.

Or perhaps in a third incarnation, Jim and Jane legitimately love one another. Neither could ask for more in another person; sunshine and rainbows permeate their time together.

Maybe they go out to dinner for Valentine's Day. Maybe Jim buys Jane flowers. Maybe they simply spend time in one another's presence. The ultimate point is that for those secure in their relationship, the holiday does not matter.

Valentine's Day represents nothing more or less than an affirmation of existing conditions. Unfortunately, a one-day-only validation cannot create a relationship.

If the roses are already red and the violets are already blue, Valentine's Day does little more than act as the daily confirmation of a healthy relationship.

If they aren't, this particular holiday could very well hurt the situation.

At best, it will merely put off the inevitable for a few more painful weeks.

So eat your chocolate, students of Santa Clara. Just do not put too much stock in what it means to your love life.

Julie Herman is a freshman undeclared major.