Culch Valentine’s: The lucky man

I’m a very lucky man. I’m in a long-term relationship with a woman I love and we have a great bond. There is one small, annual annoyance about this relationship and it is due to a trick of the calender. You see, St. Valentine’s Day is celebrated on the 14th February every year. Our anniversary is the 7th February.

Now, I have plenty of grievances about the Hallmarky-ness of the Valentine’s celebration, it irks me that there is one arbitrary day each year when people are supposed to express their affections through consumerism due to social convention. And it’s not just Valentine’s Day, which I kind of get as it is at least a saint’s day, and so it has some nature of permanence. Take New Year’s for example. Our earth travels in a vaguely elliptical orbit around the Sun. This orbit, as anybody who has seen a picture of an ellipse (or a circle for that matter) can understand, is continuous: it has no start and no end. So why do we pick this one particular date as THE start/end or our solar cycle, given the endless, infinite nature of travelling along a continuous line? Obviously, we know how long it takes to do a lap of the Sun, so why do we pick a day that’s less than a week after Xmas? Couldn’t we have an equally nice time in, say, August, when there are no other important celebrations to contend with, Easter is a distant memory and it’s still a way off until Hallowe’en?

While the logic behind my argument is obviously flawless, it’s not the timekeepers or the calender makers I’m really annoyed at. I’m annoyed because these two date clashes in my life share a common problem: one week is not a sufficient duration of time to separate two important events. You’re hardly over the turkey sandwiches and you’re into the pointless counting of New Year’s Eve. Imagine if you had to suffer the same horrible brevity of preparation time and cashflow, but with romance and the person you love instead of a rubbish Kris Kindle and M&S Prosecco! That’s me, every February. I know people who have birthdays on the 22nd or 28th of December, and naturally enough their presents and visits and so forth are all tied in to the festive celebrations, and this seems natural. But there’s some point in the human psyche where we assume that 5 days is just enough to create a separation of events when, really, what can you get done in a week? I work shifts so my hours are split between mornings and evenings, same as my better half, and we’re both particularly skint at the moment due to some expensive investments beyond our control. We are short on time and cash every year at this point. And then suddenly this conversation starts popping up:

‘Oh what are you getting her for Valentine’s Day?’
‘Well, it’s our anniversary first on the 7th.’
‘Oh, how fun, so you get to have two celebrations!’
*smash*

I’m sure there’ll come a time when finances are better for us both and if we get married or anything like that we’ll have a new, different anniversary. But until then, the coincidence of when we first got together and the immediate pressure of celebrating our romance twice in a week is ridiculous. And I’m supposed to be lucky!