Breaking Hearts and Breaking Banks: Stop Celebrating Valentine’s Day

by ELLIE MCCUSKER

Valentine’s Day: a utopian day of opening gifts, smelling flowers, looking lovingly into another’s eyes and sharing spaghetti over a candlelit dinner. Unless you’re single. Valentine’s Day for singles consists of constant reminders of your misery. Sure, many people may be content without a partner, but it’s no secret that singles worldwide dread Valentine's Day. According to the website Insider.com, for 47.3% of single people above 18 (115.78 million people), Valentine’s Day realis tically sucks — it’s either a painful reminder of a lost re lationship or of tragic loneliness, and it all happens while you are eating chocolate alone, watching a rom-com.

While it seems that Valentine’s Day is incon sequential, the holiday’s focus on happy couples and are potentially deceiving. Despite endless sweet messages and gifts, many women spend the day in fear. Jessica Dearth, director of the women’s shelter Officials with Eve Incorporated, says that stresses and financial burdens of the holiday increase domestic violence and emotional abuse. Nearly 5 million women are victims of abuse annually on Valentine’s Day. Gifts, affection and love bombing are used as manipulative weapons to control the abused.

Gifts, flowers, jewelry and expensive meals add up not only in price but also in waste. According to a survey of 7,384 adults by the National Retail Federation, the average person spends $161.96 on Valentine’s Day for their partners, children, parents and friends. Further, men spend $229.54, while women spend $97.77, creating unequal presumptions between men and women. The NRF survey concluded that $3.9 billion is spent on jewelry, $2.1 billion on clothing, $1.8 billion on candy, $1.3 billion on cards and $886 million on pets. Realistically, Valentine’s Day puts a price on love and is a competition for wealth and materialism.

Not only are obscene amounts of money spent, but the result is products wasted. Cut flowers generate 9 million kilograms of CO2 , the release of balloons take 450 years to degrade, while straws, plastic bags and cards take 500 years to degrade, according to Plastic Oceans. Despite Valentine’s Day’s intentions of admiration and joy, it creates broken hearts, insecurities, empty wallets, dead flowers and candy wrappers. For singles and couples, the negatives outweigh the benefits. Valentine’s Day is notoriously a dreadful holiday.