Pressure for Romance

Why Women Worry on Valentine’s Day

If there is one thing I have realized as I have gotten older it is that I re­ally hate Valentine’s Day. Not to be a Debbie Downer or come off as the Grinch who Stole Valentine’s Day, but I honestly hate what the holiday has become. Apart from the fact that it makes single people feel even worse about being single, the day has become solely a hallmark holi­day for retailers to play on womens’ emotions.

Women put so much pressure on their significant others to make Val­entine’s Day special that they forget that it is not that important of a day. If your boyfriend or husband opens the door for you every time you go out, buys you flowers and brings you gifts on a regular basis, you should consider yourself a lucky woman. Therefore, why do you feel the need to pressure him into going above and beyond on one particular day?

In any relationship, I always em­phasize that I do not want to do any­thing special on Valentine’s Day. I have no desire to stand in long lines at restaurants waiting for tables, holding the same bouquet of red ros­es every other woman is holding, or getting a cheesy teddy bear that will only end up in a pile of other cheesy teddy bears. I want to feel special on every date, but how can I feel special surrounded by dozens of other cou­ples doing the same thing I am doing on the same day because it is what they are “supposed” to be doing?

The true test of whether he is the right guy or even a good guy is by observing how he treats you every other day of the year. If he buys you flowers and has them delivered to you simply because it is Tuesday, he is a keeper. If he stops by your house on his way home from work just so that he can give you the chicken soup he bought for you because he knows you have been sick all week, he is a good guy. If he opens the door for you everywhere you go, whether it is at the grocery store or an upscale restaurant, he might be the one.

However, I am not going to call my friends and tell them that I am hearing wedding bells simply be­cause my boyfriend bought me flow­ers and candy on Valentine’s Day, nor would I consider him a keeper just because he actually took me to a restaurant where we did not have to read the menu through the car window at a drive through. I want to be treated to fancy dinners and chiv­alry on a regular basis, and if I am given that, why should I put more emphasis on any one specific day of the year?

I cannot describe how many times I have been awoken by phone calls from friends sobbing first thing in the morning on February 15. “He didn’t even buy me flowers,” “I can’t believe he said he had to work,” “How could he forget that it was Valentine’s Day?”

Unfortunately, I could not tell these women that they were being foolish and that I had no desire to listen to them whine about some­thing so trivial. Instead, I had to be a supportive friend and in some cases a mother and tell them that the guy was not worth it and that they will eventually find someone worthy of them.

At the end of the phone calls, I could not help but ask myself, do these women really needed to call someone in order to find out that they were dating losers. The reason they were so upset that their boy­friends had not done anything nice for them was probably because their boyfriends never do anything nice for them, so they expect to be taken to the moon and back on Valentine’s Day.

If these women, as well as women in general, were truly happy with their significant others and their re­lationships, there would be no need to worry so much about Valentine’s Day because every day with their boyfriends or husbands feels like Valentine’s Day.

The moral of the story is not to make every woman as disturbed by the emphasis put on Valentine’s Day as I am, but to make women realize that they deserve to be treated like queens every day of the year. Do not give your boyfriends an excuse to slack off on the ro­mance during the rest of the year as long as he can play the role of a hopeless romantic on February 14. Show your significant other that as long as he is always good to you, you will not be the crazy lady cry­ing on the phone to her friends and everyone who will listen, telling them what scum her boyfriend is because he did not bring her flow­ers or take her to a nice restaurant on Valentine’s Day.