SUNDAY, 16 FEBRUARY 2025

It was Valentine’s Day this Friday, so what else could I write about this week other than love? The card shop windows were glittering confections of impassioned red and pink, the restaurants were offering special love menus for dating couples and placing a rose in a vase on every table, the champagne flowed (or at least the Prosecco), the florists and chocolatiers had grins that spread from cheek to cheek, and I’m sure someone somewhere got out their Barry White collection, crooned joyously along, and dreamed of running their fingers through the undergrowth of his chest.

It’s easy to mock it all, and to say that the greatest love of all is that of big business for money. But big business is only snatching the opportunity to fill a real need that most people have to be loved and to love in return. Perhaps those of us who had parents who loved us unconditionally (which is by no means guaranteed) are trying to recapture the feeling of security this engendered, while those who never knew that kind of parental love are desperately searching for something to fill a lack that they’ve felt for the whole of their lives. And sadly for some, I think, this lack of early love has scarred them for life, so that they are unable to feel worthy of love and tragically make sure they never find it, even if their trashing of their relationships is subconscious. Having loving parents is a gift we take for granted if we were lucky enough to enjoy it.

But Valentine’s Day isn’t about parental love or any of the other kinds of love which the ancient Greeks had many different words for, unlike the impoverished English language which lumps them all together under a single moniker. We’re talking Romantic love with a capital R, the subject of thousands of saccharine songs which send us messages we can’t help but buy into even if we know we’re being played for fools. I’m not saying that finding a love that lasts is impossible: I’m well aware that it’s not, since I have friends who have been together for fifty years and still show all the signs of profound and lasting devotion. It’s just not romantic love anymore. It’s something deeper.

So is Valentine’s Day just a bit of harmless fun or does it send out messages that make many of us unhappy? The studs and the belles love it, of course, as they line up the cards they receive and display them proudly on Instagram, but what about the nine-stone weaklings and the plain Janes whose mantelpieces are notably empty (if mantelpieces still exist)? As we get older, it’s easy to forget just how desperate most of us are for affirmation from our peers when we are teenagers and how rejection can cut to the quick at that age. In some ways little has changed since I was in my teens, but in other ways contemporary social media accentuate the pain of rejection by making the suffering so public.   

My favourite whipping boys, the evolutionary psychologists, will state that things like Valentine’s Day and romantic love in general are just nature’s way of making sure we procreate and then stay together afterwards until we’ve brought up our children in a way that is essential for a primate social species. It’s hard to argue with this, or the second point at least, although if all that matters is sufficient procreation to replicate the genes, sexual desire alone is surely enough without any need for a bouquet of red roses and a box of Ferrero Rocher. Because there are also cultural roots to western notions of romantic love which are specific to the European tradition and quite unlike the way desire is integrated into other societies before their brush with Europe: medieval chivalric romance, the troubadours who sang about it, the plaintive ballads, Petrarch’s sonnets.

One fascinating aspect of romantic love is its association with tragedy. Everyone knows that Romeo and Juliet didn’t end up in a cottage in the countryside with roses above the door, and, although much less implanted in the public consciousness, poor old Abelard truly suffered for his passion for Héloïse. All of this can of course be seen as mere literary conceit, but the core has survived the ages remarkably well. Leap forward not that much short of a millennium, and there are songs from 1960s girl bands like the Shangri-las with their stories which inevitably ended in tears: boys who couldn’t wait to crash their motorbikes or cars, while their helpless girlfriends looked on and clutched their Kleenex. Doomed love, secret sex, and gruesome death seem entwined in the western consciousness.

This is a very teenage thing, though: once we hit the middle-aged market and the books that, as a baby boomer, I still label Mills and Boon, romantic tales must needs end happily. In their classic form, the bad boys became doctors and lawyers and the teenage female protagonists found work as nurses and secretaries, and marriage was de rigueur in the final page. It won’t surprise you that I don’t read a lot of this stuff but I’m told that the content can be quite spicy nowadays as these books catch up with contemporary sexual mores. But I fear this faux sophistication and somewhat tame carnality will detract from their campy content. Call me old-fashioned, but I want doctors who are strong-jawed and nurses who have never been kissed.

In the second wave of feminism, these books attracted a lot of criticism for selling girls and women the fantasy of romantic love and acting as pernicious agents of patriarchy. And although I’m a guy, I can testify to the power of these illusions of everlasting love, for as an adolescent I spent a lot of time dreaming about how some day he’d come along, the man I love. Looking back in retrospect, though, there was much that was condescending about our theorising in the 1970s, as we congratulated ourselves on being the enlightened ones who had seen through the false consciousness, and we put down women who read Mills and Boon as brain-dead dopes and dupes. There was a reaction against this not long after, as academics in cultural studies departments, heavily influenced by postmodernism, argued that girls and women were using these books as tools, fully aware of what they were doing, and extracting what they wanted from them, an escape from everyday reality, and never really bought into the dream. The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in the middle.

Men, of course, at least those who like to think of themselves as real men, pretend they are above this kind of thing and that they only join in the game because their girlfriends will make life unbearable if they don’t. Don’t believe a word of it in most cases. Yes, men might be disdainful of the chocolates and the dozen red roses, but they are every bit as desperate to become the people society tells them they should become: those public statements of gender normality, husbands and fathers. While it’s true that, much to the consternation of traditionalists, a surf through social media suggests that more men these days are beginning to reject these roles, the pressure to get married is still very strong, and once we leave the affluent west seems almost as obligatory as ever.

The same traditionalists, though, often seem conflicted about Valentine’s Day. On the one hand, as opponents of everything ‘woke’, they intensely dislike what they call the Dianafication of society, where everyone wears their heart on their sleeve and blubbers out their inner feelings at the drop of a hat (an opinion that I have to admit I largely agree with, although this will weaken my woke credentials). So they ought to hate the roses and the overblown sentimentality. On the other hand, Valentine’s Day glorifies the gender roles which traditionalists believe are natural and inevitable and therefore transcend culture, and encourages the me-Tarzan, you-Jane world to which they hope we will one day return, once we’ve found a way to convert all the pooftahs and trannies and given all the newly fey males a booster dose of testosterone.  Kinde, küche, kirche, but on one day in the year the little lady gets a pat on the head and a box of chocolates.

What I definitely think is regrettable is the guilt trip that comes with Valentine’s Day (and other days which are opportunistic commercial inventions, such as Mother’s and Father’s Day). There is an ineluctable pressure nowadays to buy cards and presents on these days as a measure of our depth of feeling, and the more elaborate and expensive the gift, the deeper our love is purported to be. As in almost every sphere of life, consumer capitalism has sunk its hooks not only into our skin but also our deepest desires, in a society where the ultimate pay-off comes not to consumers but corporations. As Tina sang, possibly as she remembered her days with Ike, ‘What’s love got to do with it?’.    

But in the end, despite the frenzy of contemporary marketing, as I said near the start of this piece, I have to question how much has really changed since I was a teen all those centuries ago. The skill with which adverts hit their spot may have been honed to the nth degree, but the need to be loved and to love is more or less the same. In some ways, perhaps, things have got worse. The pity that we used to show to women who were ‘left on the shelf’ has morphed into the hurtful, competitive shaming of a girl with a tiny roll of fat in her Instagram pic. As with every game, there are winners and losers, and I feel sorry for young people who haven’t yet learned how to shrug their shoulders and take all the sweetness with a massive pinch of salt.