Believe me, I am no March hater. Quite the contrary. March is my favourite month of the year because with it comes the death of February. That ever-pesky month that sometimes hangs around a night too long and signals the end of Summer and the return of classes. Most ignominiously however, it is the month that centres itself on humankind’s most unholy festivity.
I resent the fallacy that we all want to feel overly and overtly loved on Valentine’s Day. I resent that a man or a woman have to treat their respective partners; I resent that Valentine’s Day makes us all property – our value predetermined by the price of the gifts we receive from our partners, if indeed, we have any. I deeply resent the overpriced, over scented flowers and chalky chocolate, the latter of which is so-dotingly rejected for fear of bloating until guiltily – and post-coitally – binged in the early hours of February 15th.
If a person I was seeing attempted to shower me in roses and shout me a night out they would first have to triumph over my vomiting onto them. Though that would be one way to get hot and bothered, ejecting last night’s Indian food is not so sexy. Besides, such annual, formalised chunder, borders on what I may only describe as “festive bulimia”.
How we feel about the people we love should not be reduced to the flash of showy jewellery, or the bite-sized meal valued at the GDP of Liberia. I don’t want to be so didactic as to tell society what it should want, but when its unfettered desires lead to $52 million USD being poured into that so-innovatively named 2010 abomination Valentine’s Day, I feel that my humble advice could not hurt.
What we want for Valentine’s Day is a person whose actions do not teeter on the edge of the emetic, who we can take out for greasy Chinese and split the bill with, drink cheap beer on the couch with, perhaps have a good fuck on top of the laundry with while the late-night news is on television. What films and concocted couple’s tales should teach us is that Valentine’s Day is nothing more than an exercise in consumerism. It should stimulate the economy – but not your partner. When we buy into the Valentine’s hype, we become just another shitty rose petal on the giant double bed that is modern romance. Nobody wants to be a bed-petal. You don’t want to know where those have been.
What we want is a person who’ll show up at our door the morning after Valentine’s Day with 80%-off-yesterday’s-tulips and two cups of coffee, saying:
“Hey. It’s the 15th of February and I love you even more than I did yesterday.”
Hear that, Hallmark cards? That’s what we want. Fuck Cupid.
We acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, who are the Traditional Custodians of the land on which Woroni, Woroni Radio and Woroni TV are created, edited, published, printed and distributed. We pay our respects to Elders past and present. We acknowledge that the name Woroni was taken from the Wadi Wadi Nation without permission, and we are striving to do better for future reconciliation.