How Was Valentine’s Day for You?

Judging by every article, ever, about Valentine’s Day, it’s amazing that there hasn’t been an annual national boycott. 

Apparently, everyone hates it. And some of that is bah-humbug stuff about commercialism and being forced to spend money for no good reason. Some of it is the pressure it puts on single people. But I wondered about the effect people felt it had on their relationships. So I asked around, nosily. And here are a few thoughts that materialised…

‘A first date on Valentine’s Day has got to be the worst idea since the mankini,’ said a friend. He (oh yes, a man) had made this Valetine’s error two years ago (not the mankini).  He was set up on a date and since it fell on a Saturday it didn’t seem unreasonable. Oh, how wrong that was. 

The pair found themselves in a restaurant surrounded by heart-shaped balloons and dishes named ‘Smoochy Sorbet’. The man describes how it was all intensely uncomfortable: ‘Perhaps if we’d had more in common we could have bonded over the whole experience and laughed about it. As it was we said a rather final goodnight and we never contacted each other again. The friend who set us up was distraught, and kept saying things like: “but you were made for each other! Why would you go and ruin that by going out on Valentine’s Day?”‘

So how about Valentine’s dinner a bit further into a relationship? Say, a couple of months? When all is going well and you think it might just go somewhere if only you had time to see each other more than once every week or two? How much pressure is there, being surrounded by all this you-will-love-each-other stuff? 

Apparently, a little too much for comfort, according to some female friends who felt that their partners in question looked around a little too anxiously at what everyone else was doing. ‘Are we being romantic enough?’ ‘What level of romance are we at?’

And the couples who have been together forever? In restaurants you can see them barely talking to each other over their meal on Valentine’s Day. 

A friend of mine had a good alternative: every year she and her boyfriend booked into a posh hotel for the night. Well, that’s one way to spell out your intentions, I suppose. Personally, I celebrated mine making my boyfriend a kind of afternoon tea-style carpet picnic (a minor mistake, with hindsight, since my foot is still booted up from a fracture and there’s really no comfortable way to sit on the floor with that) and we ate so much we thought we’d die. 

It seemed fairly romantic to me. As long as I don’t have to be around any other couples to be assaulted by the relationship-comparison factor, I’m fine. And I think that might be the key to cracking Valentine’s Day without cracking up your relationship.

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