by HALEY BLISS – City University of New York
So much has been said about Valentine’s Day, and yet the celebration endures. Perhaps it is the power of love that sustains it, or perhaps it is the machinery of modern capitalism—a well-oiled system skilled at transforming emotions into commodities. It may even be both. The commodity system does not merely sell us products; it offers a homogenized catalogue of feelings, neatly packaged and ready for consumption. In the end, it works either way.
If anthropology has taught us anything, it’s that rituals serve to reinforce social bonds, delineate in-groups and out-groups, and, in late-stage capitalism, shore up entire economic sectors. February 14th, in its contemporary Western form, is less about love and more about the performance of it—a performance that, conveniently, can be best expressed through purchases.
To understand how we got here, let’s rewind a few millennia. St. Valentine himself is an uncertain figure, possibly a composite of multiple early Christian martyrs. In other words, even the holiday’s namesake is a branding exercise. Before Hallmark got its hands on it, mid-February was host to Lupercalia, an ancient Roman fertility festival involving animal sacrifice and random matchmaking—an event that, while ethically questionable, at least had an air of spontaneity.
Today, we find a different kind of ritual sacrifice: the slow hemorrhaging of money in the name of obligatory romantic gestures. Anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in his seminal work The Gift, explored how exchanges are never truly free—every gift carries a social obligation, a demand for reciprocation. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Valentine’s Day, where the stakes of non-compliance range from passive-aggressive silence to full-scale relationship detonation. The logic is simple: if you love someone, you must demonstrate it in culturally sanctioned ways. That these ways happen to be dictated by marketing teams and florists’ guilds is, apparently, beside the point.
As a cultural phenomenon, Valentine’s Day reflects and reinforces the heteronormative structures that dominate many societies, often marginalizing those who exist outside its narrow framework. The holiday can be seen as a ritual that not only celebrates romantic love but also polices its boundaries, privileging heterosexual couples while systematically excluding others. The pervasive imagery of heterosexual romance—advertisements, greeting cards, and media portrayals—serves as a form of symbolic violence, erasing queer, non-monogamous, and non-traditional relationships from the cultural narrative. This exclusion is not merely passive; it actively discriminates by constructing a hierarchy of love, where some forms of affection are deemed legitimate and worthy of celebration, while others are rendered invisible or invalid. For LGBTQ+ individuals, single people, or those in non-normative relationships, Valentine’s Day can become a stark reminder of their societal otherness, amplifying feelings of alienation and reinforcing systemic inequities. By uncritically perpetuating these norms, the holiday becomes a tool of cultural hegemony, one that upholds and naturalizes the dominance of heteronormativity while silencing alternative expressions of love and intimacy. To take Valentine’s Day seriously, then, is to interrogate its role in sustaining these exclusionary practices and to imagine how it might be transformed into a more inclusive and equitable celebration of human connection.
This is the paradox of Valentine’s Day: a celebration of romance that often produces stress, resentment, and, occasionally, a breakup over insufficiently grand gestures.
Perhaps the real question isn’t whether to participate, but why we still buy into the idea that love requires these specific, commodified affirmations. Cultures around the world have long celebrated romance in ways that don’t rely on price tags—Japanese Tanabata is a festival of longing and poetry, while Quechua communities have historically woven love into their textiles and songs rather than discount greeting cards. Maybe the best way to honor love isn’t through frantic reservation bookings or the panicked purchase of supermarket roses, but through something both simpler and more radical: attention, presence, and perhaps, the refusal to let a billion-dollar industry dictate the contours of intimacy.