To observe that Valentine’s Day is a crass, stupid, bourgeois, tacky, irrelevant, hypercommercial, saccharine atrocity of a holiday, only taken seriously by maudlin, sentimental nitwits with horrible taste in life, is to indulge oneself in—and not to put too fine a point on any of this—a desperately boring cliche. It’s nowadays possible to simply throw out one loaded-down workhorse of an epithet, “Hallmark!,” and put the issue to pasture. The resistance movement isn’t much more inspiring; people who’d rather not, don’t, and just get plastered with their friends. They call these Anti-Valentine’s Day gatherings; we call them, you know, weeknights. Unless they happen to fall on weekends, in which case we adjust our vocabulary accordingly.
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