Valentine’s Day is one of few holidays based around a single emotion, the experience of love in its case. The only other widely celebrated holiday in Western culture that could even compare would be the other candy-exchanging celebration, Halloween, which is based on the single emotion of fear. Valentine’s Day stretches the definition of candy to include heart-shaped antacids riddled with typos. Regardless, Valentine’s Day is still often mentioned in the same breath asHalloween, Christmas, the Fourth of July, and other big names in the world of Western tradition. Does Feb. 14 really deserve the prominent title of “holiday” in the collective American consciousness or are we as a society better off without it?

Let’s just rip the pink Band-Aid off now. The idea of commercializing love is weird. Everyone knows the common gripe about any holiday: that corporations are the real beneficiaries of national and international celebrations. While cynical and trite, this argument definitely has some merit, especially concerning Valentine’s Day, a day centered around the unifying human experience of love. This is not to say other holidays like Christmas don’t owe their identity to something significant, but it’s all the more jarring to see that corporations have no qualms about hijacking such a central human experience for a few extra zeros in their bottom line.

With the scent of that sweet legal tender reaching their nostrils, companies are willing to spend a fortune to ensure that not a soul is unaware of their Valentine’s Day deals. This includes those by their lonesome, voluntarily or otherwise. Herein lies the darker side of the Valentine’s season. Especially for those in happy romantic relationships, it can be quite easy to forget that Feb. 14 is not necessarily fun for everyone. The traditional view of Valentine’s Day as a day for lovers and lovers only caters to quite the exclusive demographic. It can be rather obnoxious to people not in romantic relationships; from the moment February begins, everyone can expect a great influx of media promoting the outmoded notion that romantic love is the only love worth celebrating. That sentiment is faulty. While romantic love is a wonderful aspect of life and is worth celebrating, it represents only one facet of love, which is frankly too abstract of an idea to pigeonhole in that way. This message hides behind a facade of frilly pink hearts and flying babies, but its effects can be far less charming. By limiting the scope of love deemed to be important, people who lack this particular form of love may feel invalidated even if their lives are teeming with other forms of love such as with their family, friends, or themselves.

Valentine’s Day should be one of the most revered and joyfully celebrated holidays in the course of a year. In a world, and frankly, a nation rife with sentiments of hate, it is absolutely worth celebrating a holiday wherein love is placed front and center. But for many, all this day reminds them of is the gross commodification of love and the one-size-fits-all meaning it seems to have taken up. This is not the 95 Theses of Valentine’s Day and there will be no Valentine’s Reformation. However, there are some things that ought to change if Valentine’s ever were to be a genuine celebration of love; a complex and multifaceted wonder. This column does not have the ability to change how an entire holiday is celebrated. It won’t even meet paper until after Valentine’s Day has passed, but it’s really just about love and how it’s far more personal and variable than some would like to acknowledge. I encourage anyone reading to reflect on the love in their life in all its forms, whether or not the calendar says to.