Valentine’s Day has lost its beauty

By Beruke Makasha

Staff Writer

Valentine’s Day, the day lovers flood each other with gifts, romance and an annoying amount of social media posts regarding how much they love the other person, is irritating. Don’t get me wrong, I love love. I find it to be very delightful and one should experience in their life at least once. I just don’t like the social and economic aspect of it.

Feb 14, has to be the biggest scam of all the holidays. The way society constructed the idea of “LOVE” changed the pure essence of it into a materialistic nightmare. Especially I dislike how media found a way to manipulate it into ad revenue that racks up about $18.2 billion in the United States every year, that’s an average of $136.57 per person.

The history of Valentine’s Day by most people is skewed. The origin never related to love and lovers, it’s history was reconstructed and manipulated to play a role in society.

“Saint Valentine’s” Day is a topic a lot people can’t seem to find common ground. While some believe Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine’s death or burial–which probably occurred around A.D. 270–others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia.

Celebrated at the ides of February, or February 15, Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman God of Agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders: Romulus and Remus. Not

a lot of people know this story and those who do, don’t know which one to believe.

Between the burden of finding the perfect gift for your boo, the anxiety of finding a Valentine gift, plus the pressure to spread love to people you don’t even like, makes Valentine’s Day toxic. If you don’t want to buy into the societal pressure of this heart-shaped holiday, it might help think of it like any another Thursday

in the age of everyone living out loud on line, it’s almost impossible to avoid having Valentine’s Day shoved down your throat, which actually makes a strong case for a February social-media detox. There is no problem in being single, but in this age with the social media presence, it has almost become a sin. Seeing and hearing about other’s expressing their love in exaggerated ways sometimes makes it difficult to avoid comparing them to our own, wrote Jonathan Fader, Ph.D., in “Psychology Today.” “These comparisons can lead to dissatisfaction about our own way of celebrating, even if it was perfectly enjoyable and satisfying in the moment.”

Valentine’s Day is a holiday that has lost its meaning and has become something disgusting under the shade of beauty. The whole holiday is promoting love, that’s what it’s based around, but literally is nothing but mass advertisement on products that hold value depending on either the quality or quantity. It’s not that it’s wrong to spoil loved ones, but the way the values of love and its essence