"Single Awareness Day"

Or Valentines Day. VD for short.

Welcome to the most unimaginative, manipulative, shallow, consumerist orientated day of the year.
February 14th is primarily designed to make people miserable and/or confused. It's an invention of glorious capitalism, where big business can be made through the sale of fat-creating chocolates, over-sized cards with crap slushy poems, and cuddly toys holding hearts with slogans like "I Wuv U". I ought to market teddy bears like the one on the right with my own cynical slogans and make a fortune.

I look on the people who fall for this day with contempt. They fall for the banners in the windows, the slogans and the TV adverts that say the straight-to-video romantic-comedy is "the perfect gift for Valentines". They've fallen for the transparent nothingness that is the product of a money-grabbing fat-cat boss who wants to make his shareholders happy.
They think that by buying an overpriced cuddly toy and card, then paining themselves for days over the poems inside shows they care. They even think it'll win the heart of the person they like.
Maybe it works, but then that person is a fool as well.

The single people who aren't in a relationship look at the day differently: they get nothing and consequently feel unloved, rejected and make them question what is wrong with them that they're oh-so lonely.

VD gets harder when you're in a relationship. Because, let's be honest, who cares?
As soon as February arrives boyfriends up and down the country moan just a little bit more and watch the day loom ever closer wondering what the hell to do this year.
Some men are lucky: their girlfriends recognise the day for the putrid nonsense that it is and say they don't want anything.
Some men are unlucky in that their girlfriends say they don't want anything, when really they mean they do.
Every year, these unlucky men feel obliged to do something every year, knowing that the woman in his life will be telling all her friends what they did/didn't do. You'll either be hailed as a great boyfriend by everyone through your cliched dinner, flowers and chocolate routine. Or you'll have your girlfriends friends telling her she can do better and get a man who cares because he let the day slide.

I for one will be ignoring the day.
Although nobody knows how Valentines Day started, which makes the day even more ridiculous, I could celebrate in the way it is widely suggested: drag a priest from his church, beat him to within an inch of his life then chop off his head proclaiming Christianity to be evil.

I think I'll watch a film with fast cars, explosions, maybe starring Arnie killing lots of people with big guns and one-liners. I'll revel in my own male chauvinism and eat chocolate I bought for myself: I won't buy them for a woman because I don't want her to get fat. See? I'm all heart.