Valentine’s Day is a day where we celebrate Saint Valentine dying for our sins, then resurrecting a couple of days later in order to give flowers and chocolates to a bunch of women who he wanted to have sex with. Or something.
Anyway, convoluted backstory aside, the Valentine’s Day we know and love/tolerate today ritually involves us expressing our gratitude to our girlfriends for staying with us even when we ignore them in order to play FIFA.
However, we do have a few gripes with it. Here are 7 problems we have with Valentine’s Day.
Photo: Getty Images/Denise M Patton
Paul Tamburro is the UK Editor of Crave Online. Follow him on Twitter @PaulTamburro.
7 Problems Men Have with Valentine's Day
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Flowers
What constitutes a nice flower? Are the red ones nice? What about the pink ones? Or are the yellow ones the best? Is their scent important? What about longevity? If the flowers shrivel up and die the morning after you've given them to her, will she believe it to be a visual metaphor for the decaying state of your relationship?
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'Relaxing' Mini-Breaks
The unofficial definition of 'relaxing' is 'to be away from other human beings, particularly children'. Unfortunately, the problem with booking a "relaxing" mini-break for Valentine's Day is that every other fucker is doing exactly the same thing, thus leading you to a hellishly crowded destination filled with people who are as equally annoyed by your presence as you are by theirs.
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Booking Restaurants
You've had plenty of time to book a reservation for Valentine's Day but, acting under the assumption that there exists an infinite number of tables in an infinite number of restaurants, you decide to leave it until the morning before V-Day until you finally start making some calls. Unsurprisingly, the only restaurants that have vacancies are the ones that smell like armpit with chefs that who would rather take out the back and garrote you than cook your steak rare.
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Public Declarations of Love
What's the social media etiquette for Valentine's Day? Do you post a haiku on Facebook? Do you post a series of photos of your wonderful day of eating and looking at each other you're having on Instagram? Or do you retweet that grayscale photograph she posted of the both of you? Or do you not worry about detailing every aspect of your day on the internet, and instead just enjoy each other's company?
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Not Having Sex
Valentine's Day is essentially just extremely long-winded foreplay. Everything you do up until you both go to bed is building up to having sex. You buy her roses, she buys you a card, she makes you breakfast, you talk, you go for a walk, you buy her dinner, she laughs, you laugh, she laughs some more, you drop a bit of your lasagna on your shirt - all of this is just frivolous shit getting in the way of you humping each other. Why?
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Deliveries
If you and your girlfriend will not be waking up on Valentine's Day morning in the same house, then chances are you have arranged a delivery of flowers/chocolates/human hearts to be sent to her. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming amount of deliveries being made on Valentine's Day, chances are that there will be a problem with yours and, instead of receiving a bouquet of roses, your girlfriend will instead receive a box containing Brad Pitt's wife's head from SE7EN.
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Organising Stuff
Our girlfriends are on target with their five-year plan; we have no idea what we're going to do after we've finished eating breakfast. Valentine's Day requires planning that, quite frankly, we are not capable of, because any planning other than deciding what we're going to eat for the aforementioned breakfast simply doesn't happen. We "live each day like it's our last", which means that we melancholically wander around in our underwear questioning what the point of it all is.