The Surly Valentine

When did this become a thing, this wide-eyed tacky embrace of all things coupledom for St. Valentines' day in Australia? Like Easter and Christmas, it seems to come on earlier and stronger every year. Even my beloved Aldi, the cheap eurotrashy supermarket that keeps me in mushrooms, broccoli and gluhwein while letting me keep my labour in the lower paid community sector, is, two weeks out from the supposed big day, offering chocolate roses. It begins to look as though a total boycott of the festival of mush is entirely impossible. Is there nowhere outside the curmudgeonly cave that is safe from kitsch heartshapes, pinks and reds and cliched sentiment?

It is beyond unlikely that I will be spending February 14th entwined with some other soul, making mushy faces in some overcrowded restaurant, gushing over something Hallmark finds a romantic sentiment, and pretending that every cliched motif of romanticism is somehow a sweet and unique expression of something genuine, as opposed to a crassly commercial, over-packaged and manufactured emotion. Of course, your Curmudgeon would say that. My history around these situations is somewhat fraught.

Growing up in Australia in the 1990s, Valentines Day was a concept as foreign as Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Halloween. There were always going to be a couple of people who embraced the concept, but we never exchanged cards at school or really focussed on the day as a calendar event. When I was fourteen, I contemplated organising a Valentines' day gift in a fit of tacky adolescence, but decided instead to dispense chocolate frogs to other girls at my single sex school who did not have single stems of roses to carry from class to class all day (P.S girls who did have roses, please note they *will* fit into a locker, stop with the conspicuous smuggery). That became a fun tradition as, adolescents being adolescents, there was always someone in need of chocolate and cheering up on this day designed to remind us all that, OMG, the perfect state of being is to be permanently attached to someone else.

As we got older, it became the Anti-Valentines outdoor cinema night, or the Lonely Hearts (fuck you, Valentines Day) bar crawl. It was a paean and ode to our youth, our freedom, and the city we found ourselves in. Healthy sense of irony engaged - no one was particularly bitter about being single, but nor were we in a hurry to hide at home from the smug couple hordes. We believed this night should belong to us as well.

I haven't always been as single on Valentines day as I will be this year. I too have had the gushy Valentines Day experience of the cringeworthily cutesy young love variety. I forget what we did, but I recall he wrote me a poem and we had what could somewhat unoriginally be described as a magical evening. Melbourne in February puts on decent weather, and it felt like we had all the time in the world. It was coffee, sunshine, our own little world - but then, when you're a little bit in love with someone every day is like that. The crowds and the conspicuous coupledom of the holiday of lurve neither adds nor detracts, because that would involve peeking outside the adolescent-hormone bubble of each other and noticing that the rest of the world continues to turn.

The relationship was pretty seriously on the rocks when we shared a Valentines Day which involved a teddy bear holding a heart, a single rose, and some chocolate, the scatterbomb approach to human engagement if I've ever seen it. I was never sure if he covered all of the traditional bases because we had just gotten back together after a break-up, if everything was half-price (since we'd missed the actual day out of a combination of busyness and apathy), or if he genuinely didn't realise that the poem he'd written me a year before, the notes he used to leave scattered around my room, actually meant something, whereas a bear saying "I wuv you" means someone's suffered a frontal lobotomy. We had stopped putting anything of ourselves into what we were doing, and we were ready to settle for tokenistic and expected.

The curmudgeon comes out here - these things were somewhat meaningless because they had nothing to do with who either of us were as people. They involved a transaction in which no thought was required, to purchase a message that was made trite and somewhat meaningless by mass-production. This is not an aesthetic or consumeristic point - I would not have liked the idea of these gifts any more if they were expensive, quite the contrary - the only reason I had any time for them at all was because, despite everything, I cared for the person proffering them. It was the fact that thoughtfulness ceased to become a part of the situation. A plush heart to say "I love you" is about as meaningful as a fill-in-the-blanks eulogy from a cereal packet.

Since then I've largely avoided VD in all its forms. If I like someone, I don't need the excuse to show my affection. I do hereby pledge, however, that I will never buy someone a plush animal wielding a heart in cold blood. Maybe this year I'll distribute chocolate frogs to my friends or leave a thoughtful note somewhere to be found, or I'll go back to my favourite haunts and let my city be my Valentine for one more year. Being a complete and solitary human being on Valentines Day, despite the social pressures of monogamy etcetera, is something of a relief. This year I'm curling up with a volume of Charlie Brooker's articles, listening to Van Halen and not giving a fuck what anyone thinks. I recommend it.