No strong, independent woman gives a flying box of Milk Tray about V Day. She still wants a present though
‘How about writing something on Valentine’s Day?” suggests the editor. “We’re short on romantic stuff this month.” Valentine’s Day and romance are generally thought to make great bedfellows, but to my mind (a mind that’s not a little bruised and battle-weary), it’s very much a case of never the twain shall meet. Those who peddle their wares in time for Valentine’s Day labour under the pretence that a woman’s greatest erogenous zone is her heart (clue: it’s not. That’s why dildos are popular).
In truth, they’re selling cards, flowers, chocolate and lingerie not to nourish her heart, but to safeguard her pride and bolster her ego. Violets may be blue, but a simple truth remains; they’re not as blue as most women tend to end up as the sun sets on another sub-par Valentine’s Day.
Somewhere down the line, a dodgy memo appears to have been dispatched by accident to Irish men. Its general gist is that one verse of ‘roses are red’ is a wooing technique of the highest order. The same memo states that this sort of malarkey is only meaningful on one day of the year. What’s more, it will render the guy in question immune to dog-walking/toilet-cleaning duties for a good week or two.
Herein lies the awful, mammoth conundrum: in much the same way as it’s unfashionable to like, say, hill-walking or Two and a Half Men, it is similarly naff to proclaim Valentine’s Day as anything but a gargantuan rip-off. This month, expect to hear women the breadth of the capital riff on about commercial-exploitation-this and Hallmark-hokum-that. Independent, modrin women don’t want flowers and chocolates just because convention tells them they want them, they proclaim in unison.
What these women are not saying out loud, of course, is that they’re secretly, silently hoping for – nay, expecting – a sugary seduction routine that would put a horse into a glycaemic coma. And here’s the really gas bit; men are supposed to figure this out all on their lonesome. Woe betide the poor guy who actually takes this anti-Valentine’s Day diatribe at face value. Adding insult to injury, what’s meant to be a harmless enough exercise in brownie-point earning often goes spectacularly awry and ends in tears.
Me? I find myself solo this month, and am happy to fly under the radar on the whole thing. Yet whether loved up and enveloped in a cloud of fuzzy affection, or braving the muddy trenches of singledom, St Valentine’s Day has long been a (red rose) thorn in my side. It’s the forced jollity of it that I can’t stand; the sly one-upmanship that grips offices across the land as women start to tot up those tokens of affection. Nothing makes a girl’s ‘Anti-Valentine’ stance crumble quicker than the sight of an Interflora van. No matter what your personal status, it’s damn hard not to get sucked into that strange, itchy sense of expectation that creeps into the day.
Even when in relationships, the V-bomb has always managed to blow up spectacularly in my face. Two years ago, my (now ex) boyfriend showed up at my apartment dressed for all the world like a Bible salesman (his mum told him to), brandishing a box of chocolates taller than his six-foot frame and looking ever so pleased with himself. My heart all but broke at his earnest, whoo-look-at-me vibe. If he thought that landing me with a 17,763-calorie gift was going to enhance our relationship, we really were in trouble.
A year before that, another unfortunate paramour presented me with a printout of a cartoon couple, displayed under a poem which ended with the line “Forever may our hearts be true.” Shamefully, my girlfriend behaviour was so malignant that it made the ‘put-out-the-bins’ girlfriend in the McDonald’s Eurosaver ad look like a real keeper. “Which website did you rip this shite off of?” I snarled. “I wrote it myself,” he wibbled. In retrospect, this was the sort of touching gesture I had been crying out for, yet it was clouded under the huge weight of expectation. In the end, there was no way out of that cul-de-sac except to send the poor chap on his merry way.
For the month that’s in it, I’ve done some research on the man who ostensibly started all this brouhaha: the original St Valentine didn’t know a long-stemmed rose from a bag of crystal meth. He is also, according to my findings, the patron saint of beekeepers, people who faint and epileptics. How he became such a figurehead for our romantic lives remains a guarded mystery.
No matter your stance on the day that’s in it, one truth remains; there are few more depressing sights than a couple sitting in bored silence in a restaurant strewn with heart-shaped balloons and red streamers...and paying over the odds for a ‘special’ menu to boot. For a winning February 14th, slow dance around your living room to Mazzy Star or laugh together while watching The Thick of It on DVD. In the meantime, chaps, a word in your shell-likes – it’s not too much to grasp that a bunch of orchids delivered in August or a candlelit dinner booked in April is when the brownie points really start to add up. Milk Tray be damned.
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