Because the internet demands lists and manufactured controversy, herewith is a ration of both: Valentine's Day Should Be Abolished, and You're Doing It Wrong, Anyway.
1. Every day should be Valentine's Day, if you're in love. Every day you should come home with flowers and a box of confections and a card that has a picture of an important circulatory muscle, stylized so its ventricles resemble the gentle hillocks of a Grant Wood painting, or cleavage.
2. If you do bring these things home every day, though, the other person might say, "You're spending $9.50 a day on cards with pink and red depictions of a fist-sized organ. Do you know what would happen if you saved that money? Have you heard of compound interest?"
"Yes," you respond lovingly, "but you buy two soy lattés every day, and they cost at least that much."
"That's coffee. Coffee is important."
Weeks later, to girlfriends: "He complains that I buy coffee! He's so controlling. And cheap." (Friends all nod sympathetically, because they never liked you.)
3. It sets up unrealistic expectations. If your relationship is in a state that intersects with your first Valentine's Day, everything's over the moon and it's wonderful. But to be honest, you could share National Neuter a Ferret Day and it would be magical.
If the relationship has been going on for a while and you have attended at least two weddings as a couple where a drunk uncle said, "So, you two are next, right?" and you both felt your faces pucker, this will be the Valentine's Day you don't talk about getting married.
Because that would spoil the day devoted to love.
4. It encourages moronic websites aimed at millennials with the attention span of a hummingbird in a hurricane to click on things like "We can guess your relationship status based on this simple quiz." It goes like this:
Q. Think of your favorite Disney movie, which gives you warm emotions different from the brackish landscape of your current social existence, fraught as it is with the trappings of adulthood but none of the feelings of confident accomplishment you expected would happen. Are you Belle from "Beauty and the Beast," or an unnamed crustacean glimpsed briefly in the background of "The Little Mermaid"?
A. If you answered either, you are not in a relationship, because people who are don't have time for stupid things like this.
5. The carbon footprint of transporting flowers from Central America to North American grocery stores is tremendous, but you don't care because even if the impact of this single rose from the gas station is equal to a tire fire the size of North Dakota burning for 17 years, you'd better have one.
6. Men never know if a single rose is romantic or cheap. Hint: It's romantic if you're a millionaire, and it's in a thin crystal vase, and the vase is on the balcony in Monaco, and because you are a genius industrialist who has programmed a drone to shine a spotlight on the rose while it plays that Placibo DaMango aria from the Bellagio fountain. Otherwise, no.
7. Grandma sends you a card, and that's nice, I guess, but it's also kinda weird.
8. You are reminded when you got a card from a crush in school, looking for hints, poring over its words like they were a cryptic Nostradamus couplet. You hated Valentine's Day.
But you know what? Eventually, it turns out OK. For all the commerce and cliches, what's the harm in Valentine's Day? It's a perfectly fine little cultural tradition, and only people desperate for attention would —
I mean, only people who want to start a conversation about its utility would suggest it should be banned.
Besides, it fills a very important function, and not just to remind us of the ineffable importance of human relationships. The only reason we suggested banning it was because it provided a clicky headline.
At the very least, it's something between Super Bowl and St. Patrick's Day. Otherwise we'd just be lost.
james.lileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 • Twitter: @Lileks • facebook.com/james.lileks
