“So tomorrow is Valentine’s Day,” my husband says to me.
“Yes, it is,” I say.
“Are you OK if we don’t celebrate?”
“Yeah, of course.”
Now, conventional wisdom says that when a woman says she doesn’t want something, she actually does want it and she’s just testing the man to see whether or not “he really knows her.”
Maybe some women do that, and if they do I say it’s a bunch of bull shit.
There are no reasons to play such childish games. If women have a real relationship with their significant other, it should include honesty and meaning exactly what you say.
And I meant it when I said it was OK if we didn’t celebrate Valentine’s Day. I’ve never liked the faux holiday and that doesn’t change now just because I’m married. The thing I hate most about the day is not that it’s a money-making scheme, but that everyone falls for it every damn year.
You know that flowers and candy and cards are more expensive on Valentine’s Day, and yet you still buy them. Why?
You know that getting a dinner reservation on Valentine’s Day will be more difficult than on any other day of the year, and yet you still attempt to make one. Why?
You know that all the other love-struck people are going to wait until the last minute to buy all their Valentine’s Day crap and so that store will be extra crowded and the lines will be extra long, and yet you still participate in fighting the crowd for the last dozen roses or the last heart-shaped box of chocolate. Why?
Why do we do this to ourselves? It’s all a frenzy to do what we are supposed to do: we buy things that are put in front of us at the store, we send cards because Hallmark tells us to. We are robots, automatically and mindlessly doing what the consumer culture dictates.