[bleep] valentine's day!

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valentine's day is designed to accomplish two things: fatten the wallets of candy makers, florists, greeting card publishers and otherwise unspecified opportunistic hucksters everywhere; and make lonely people feel totally worthless. if i were in charge i'd get rid of it for good! what do you all think?

I don't think that I'd personally miss Valentine's Day. I've never participated in it much, besides for having to give my classmates Valentine's cards in elementary school.

i think if i were a capitalist, i'd find to make lonely hearts day a reality, that could be just as, if not more profitable, than valentine's day.

^ What would people buy on Lonely Hearts Day? Chocolate for themselves?

I'm for keeping it, but against the hackneyed mainstream methods of observing it. Any uncaring jerk with a few spare quid can do those.

Don't buy a card, make one (unless you're crap at making cards, in which case consider sending a good love letter). A bought card's off-the-peg words are unlikely to be entirely sincere. Think of your own words.

Flowers? Well, don't just get the default Interflora thing. Pick a few yourself - perhaps even from your garden or that of a willing friend, or from the countryside. Or maybe a potted plant if you think she won't mind the responsibility of watering it. The trouble with cut flowers is that they die quick, which doesn't strike me as the right symbolism somehow.

Sweets and chocs? She might be on a diet. According to Robert Burns:
Ye Pow'rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies:
But, if ye wish her gratefu prayer,
Gie her a Haggis
Admittedly by "her" he meant Scotland, but he was a romantic himself so I think he'd have approved my abuse of his words. More seriously, why not get her something that she personally likes?

My first memory of giving a Valentine card is a fond one. I was very young (maybe 9 years old) and was just getting into the idea of romance. So I made a card and gave it to a girl at school. I had to pluck up all my courage to do that, and kept very quiet about it. She was delighted. I think it was the first Valentine card she'd ever had. Nothing ever went any further than that between us. I didn't know there could be anything else. We weren't friends particularly, and didn't start hanging out together or anything.

I think it's a diabolical liberty if they make schoolkids give each other Valentine cards. It's not the same if you don't want to. Nobody ever did that to us.

I think that having set days where you're supposed to give the person you love presents and do something nice for them is very empty. I would rather someone did something nice for me because they wanted to and felt moved to, not because society tells them to do it on Feb 14th.

i think restaurants that catered exclusively to singletons would get a lot of business, whether or not a lonely heart's day was established. if i were wealthy i would do that, start a lonely heart's restaurant, perhaps with a different name. i'd hire somebody to come up with something more upbeat.

You might like this Moomin Cafe. If the diner is alone they seat you opposite a giant Moomin stuffie.



https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/japan-moomin-cafe/index.html

i could handle being in a restaurant alone with a giant stuffie so long as they didn't keep trying to hide me out of sight by making me sit in the alcove next to the kitchen. that i why i stopped eating out. no respect.

Never cared for holidays myself. I used to love making a card for my ex-girlfriend/fiancee every week or two, and finding other ways to show her how I felt about her, and our relationship. It was more fun and personal, though I also gave her things on Valentine's Day.

Selected the root beer float option. Always wanted to find someone else who saw civilization as a bit of a joke, and wanted to form a bond outside of its silly role play. But, alas...we live in the age of YouTube enlightenment.

Maybe when I was 6 years old. lol. I watched that.

its an artificial holiday simply for profit as is mothers day, fathers day, sweetest day, grandparents day and all the rest. Why not show somebody you care every day of the year. My ex would buy extravagant presents on the holidays and the rest of the time abuse me. Wouldn't miss those for-profit holidays if there was never another one.

I love that Cafe!
I honestly like Valentine's Day because my best friend and i celebrate it as a special day and use it as an excuse to eat sweets.

That's pretty much what I was going to say.

It seriously confuses me how people can like it when someone gets them something because a holiday told them to. If someone was out and saw something that made them think of me and they got it, that would matter to me. A gift on a hallmark holiday...that only irks me.

The holiday itself doesn't make me feel lonely. It makes me feel annoyed. I feel the same about christmas, birthdays, anything that tells you to buy people stuff. It's all a big spectacle, stressful, completely unnecessary, based in greed, to me. Yes. I am a grinch.

First of all chocolate is very fattening. Nothing says you love someone like a present that can cause diabetes, fatness and is full of empty calories. I've always found it amusing that a popular valentines day gift can lead to tubbiness and weight gain.



P.S. It is almost a sure bet that most of us will see a "news story" touting the benefits of including chocolate in your diet between now and Valentines Day

Last edited by Aspinator on 23 Jan 2022, 10:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well, the upside is that anybody who is shy can hide behind it and pretend they were only following societal edicts. But overall I agree with you about these designated "special days." There was a song called "I Love How You Love Me" which had this line:

I love how you think of me without being told to

I didn't like the idea when I first heard it, fearing I'd lose points for forgetting to do that, but in time I grew to agree with it.