February 14th. The day we’ve collectively agreed is the day to prove we love someone. But have you ever stopped to think about how we got here?
Valentine’s Day traces back to one or more early Christian martyrs named Valentine. The romantic connection didn’t really take hold until the Middle Ages, when poets like Chaucer wove love into the narrative of the day. By the 1700s, people in England were exchanging handwritten notes and small tokens. Sweet. Simple. Human. Then the industrial revolution made mass-produced cards possible. Hallmark entered the chat in the early 1900s. And just like that, a feast day became a feeling, and a feeling became a market.
Today, Valentine’s Day is a multi-billion dollar industry. In the U.S. alone, annual spending regularly exceeds $25 billion. Flowers, chocolate, jewelry, prix fixe dinners, greeting cards: entire industries build their first-quarter projections around this single date. The formula is predictable and effective. Take an emotion people already feel (or feel pressured to perform). Attach a product to it. Create a cultural expectation around one day. Then watch spending follow. It’s not that the love isn’t real. It’s that the infrastructure around it is engineered to convert feeling into transaction. Companies know that on February 14th, people will be driven more by what they think they should do than by what they actually feel. That gap between obligation and authenticity? That’s where the money lives.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: concentrating love into one calendar square can actually flatten it. If love is a daily practice, and I believe it is, then February 14th becomes less a celebration and more a checkpoint. One that benefits sellers more than lovers. We romanticize the idea of Valentine’s Day while commercializing the execution of it. And somewhere in between, the actual love gets lost in the noise of roses that will wilt by Tuesday and chocolates no one really wanted.
I think Valentine’s Day is every other day. Every day. Not just the 14th. Especially in the world we live in right now, where division is loud and connection takes effort, every single day should be a love day. Love as a practice, not a performance. Love as something you live, not something you schedule.
This isn’t a judgment of anyone who celebrates today. Some people genuinely find meaning in the ritual: the dinner, the flowers, the gesture. I respect that. Some of us like form, and some of us are drawn to the formless. Both are valid. But if the only day you show up with love is the day the calendar (and the commercials) tell you to, it might be worth asking: who is that love actually for?
Show up today. Show up tomorrow. Show up on a random Wednesday in October when no one is watching and there’s nothing to buy.
That’s the love that matters.
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