Valentine's Day is Bunk

This is a Valentine’s Day playlist for single people.

I know, already that sentence is teeming with social assumptions of loneliness, pity and, for some bizarre patriarchal reason, a middle-aged woman with a sitting room full of cats. I want you to stop right there.

What if Valentine’s Day didn’t have this ridiculous psychological and financial influence over the masses. What if it meant something else? As a matter of fact, historically, it did once mean something else entirely.

According to Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of Colorado, Valentine’s Day has origins in both the religious sacrifice of men named Valentine and the beating of women to make them fertile. In Ancient Rome in the 3rd century AD, Emperor Claudius II would execute two men — both named Valentine — on February the 14th of different years. Their martyrdom was honoured by the Catholic Church with the celebration of St. Valentine's Day. In the 5th Century this was combined with a fertility festival. From February the 13th to 15th, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain to increase chances of fertility. The combination of these gruesome annual events is believed to have been muddled with the Norman celebration of Galatin's Day, simply because it sounded similar. Galatin meant "lover of women". Etymology really does have its own twisted kind of fun.

I am by no means suggesting that we go back to celebrating the original purpose of the day, as enjoyable as it would be for a vegetarian like me to be whipped with the hides of a dead animal. Instead, I propose we make this year’s Valentine’s Day different. The meaning has changed once before – why not change it again? We have all become accustomed to societal change in 2021 – why not push the boundaries a little further?

This year, masked up, I went to my local supermarket to see how many Valentine's cards were addressed to mum, dad, grandma, grandpa, sister, brother or friend, and was overbearingly confronted with wife, husband, boyfriend and girlfriend. A culture which aims to include all kinds of love – not just cisgender heterosexual love, should surely be advertising and therefore encouraging these other types of love on the most loved-up day of the year. Why does heterosexual marriage and romantic love take precedent again and again over other types of love? And, most importantly, what can we do about it?

This year, whether you are single, coupled, LGBTQ+, heterosexual, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a brother or a friend, if there is someone you love in any kind of way other than what is advertised in your local supermarket as romantic love, then celebrate that kind of love instead. Celebrate it louder. Celebrate it in any way that you can in these unsociable times, but make it big. Let them and yourself know how important and valued that love is. Dance in the kitchen with your cat, your tortoise, your cousin, your housemate, your mum, or by your goddamn self. These songs have the power to remind you that having a heterosexual romantic partner isn’t a fast track to golden sunsets and happiness as Disney, Hollywood and Clintons would all have you believe. Especially if you are single, don’t listen to a list full of break-up dirges, give yourself some mood-boosting self-love and dance while you still can.

So, in no particular order (apart from putting Nina first always), as my Valentine’s gift to you, I give you the songs that will change Valentine’s Day to a celebration of all love: