Valentine’s Day: The Social Media Competition Where We’re All Losers

“So what are you doing for Valentine’s day?”

Don’t worry, you don’t have to answer that. I just wanted to make sure you’re feeling the same pang of dread as me, because that’s what that question does, doesn’t it? It tethers a big ball of shame and self-loathing to our ankles whether we’re single or not. It’s sad. What was once a quirky annual milestone honouring an almost 1800-year-old saint has become a monolith. Valentine’s day is now a blinding, pink sun that explodes into life this time every year, pulling all into its heart-shaped orbit. Well, I’m not being sucked in, and you don’t have to either.

How did it happen anyway? How did Valentine’s day become something we fear when it should be a celebration of the ones we care about? Was it the Moonpig adverts telling us that treating our partners right means buying them a £5 piece of card with their name printed on it, possibly next to a picture of Baby Yoda? Probably not. Valentine’s day is big business, expected to bring in £1.37 billion this year in the UK. Still, the companies enjoying that money aren’t the ones giving us the pink-and-red blues. They can be irritating, but the pressure behind tweets like this comes from somewhere else:

So where does the pressure come from? That’d be social media and the associated culture of “keeping up with the Joneses”. “The Joneses” in this case being the combined user bases of the big social media platforms. We’re bombarded by content from people that look happier, sexier and more exciting than us. We need only open up TikTok or Instagram to be assaulted by highlight reels of romantic trips to Build-a-Bear Workshop and date nights so implausibly sweet that you’ll swear a director is waiting just out of frame preparing to yell “Cut!”. It’s exhausting.

We can’t blame the people who post all that sappy Valentine’s day content, though. They’re just as much victims as the rest of us, compelled by the social media machine to spin their personal relationships into mini reality shows. It’s infectious, and it means that we end up aping the very people who make us feel rotten in the first place. Staying in for a chilled evening on Valentine’s day? The internet’s watching, so you’d better have decked out the living room with rose petals and enough fancy candles to get the Yankee company pulling out the champagne. Going out for dinner? Not without looking like you’re starring in a perfume advert you aren’t. We only want to avoid feeling left out, but by doing that we inadvertently make everyone else feel worse.

Ultimately, this cycle has changed the whole dynamic of Valentine’s day. It’s not a matter of how we want to spend it, but what we ought to. No longer is Valentine’s day a time for paying special attention to the most beloved people in our lives. Now, it’s the climax of a romantic rat race that prioritises other people’s perceptions of our relationships over all else. And if we’re one of the unmentionables who doesn’t have a significant relationship? Well, we may as well go sit in the cupboard with the mesh umbrella and lead tennis balls because we’re useless and undeserving of recognition.

I joke, but the feelings of jealousy elicited by social media can be seriously damaging. One study refers to something called a “social resume”, essentially the online facade we present to the world. It suggests that the longer we spend exposed to other peoples’ social resumes, the harder we find it to distinguish social media fantasy from reality and the worse our mental health gets as a result. The quick-fix of social media detoxing won’t necessarily help either. Heavy use of social media has been linked by another study to a long-term decline in self-esteem and mood, so retreating to a mountaintop for a week or two probably isn’t enough to set us straight. It’s no great revelation that social media is sapping our mental health, but it takes an event like Valentine’s day to highlight the ways it’s causing real harm.

With all that said, it feels like we could all do with a reality check, so here goes. 

Valentine’s day is as significant as you want it to be. You can celebrate it however much you want, in whatever way you want and with whoever you want. That could mean sending a kind text to your partner; it could mean hanging out with friends and watching TV; it could mean doing exactly the same things you did on February the 13th and will do on the 15th. There is no right or wrong way to spend your time, and the idea that you are inadequate for failing to live up to an impossible standard is silly. Go easy on yourself. You’re doing fine, just fine.

Words by Jamie Davies

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