By Sarah Skibickyj

Valentine’s Day has turned into a day that revolves around couples but that is not all the day is about. Valentine’s Day is a day to celebrate love for everyone in your life. It is for your friends, family and then of course significant others.

As a kid, Valentine’s Day was a fun holiday in school where everyone had a little decorated mailbox and everyone received Valentine cards and candy. Then you grow up and see couples in the halls of high school exchanging gifts or cheesy Instagram posts online.

It is a cliché holiday of stores marketing flowers, chocolates, stuffed animals, balloons, etc. to those in a relationship as a gift for that special someone. Stores market the red and pink hearts and all these things showing love to their target audience, which is people in a relationship.

There is “Galentine’s Day” for friends and people might even receive gifts from family but the expectation of Valentine’s Day is focused on whether or not you are in a happy relationship with your significant other.

There are five different love languages that one can possess. They are words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time and physical touch. These could relate to how a person treats someone else on Valentine’s Day. If someone loves giving gifts they might go all out for the person they love on this day.

Despite this, Valentine’s Day is not a good demonstration of love. It gives the message that on this one day out of the entire year is when you have to treat someone special and give gifts to show your love. This should be an everyday thing, there does not need to be a specific holiday to tell you to do it.

With the holiday being focused on couples there is also the message to people that are single and not in a relationship that this holiday is not meant for them. There are so many other people in a person’s life that they could show love to but many of us have built into our brain that we have to be in a relationship on Valentine’s Day.

With the cheesy Valentine’s Day posts on social media and seeing all these cute couples it is not surprising that this has been put into people’s brains as they think about the holiday.

The love towards friends and family should be shown more and more items or TV commercials should be directed towards the love of everyone, not just your significant other. There are obviously some things that already do this but it should be more widespread so that when someone thinks of Valentine’s Day they do not just think of couples. 

Being single on Valentine’s Day does not make a person less than someone who is in a relationship. Whether or not someone is in a relationship does not define them and who they are. 

If someone wants to buy flowers and chocolates for themself or go out to a fancy restaurant with their friends then go for it. The mindset of Valentine’s Day being the only day to really show your love and it being only about couples needs to change and then maybe more people would like the holiday.

Photo via Flickr