--- title: Valentine's Day: Why I Hate The Holiday description: Valentine's Day is a holiday that doesn't even know what it's celebrating. canonical: https://time.com/4216547/valentines-day-terrible/ author: Nancy Gibbs article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-02-10T23:00:31.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:02:22.148Z og:title: Can We All Just Admit That Valentine's Day Is Terrible? og:description: "The best gift for Valentine's Day is to ignore it altogether" og:url: https://time.com/4216547/valentines-day-terrible/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt800629d125635818/69887ced0a4a2207d69c84e5/valentine-dat-candy-hearts.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2380 og:image:height: 1339 og:image:alt: 85571726 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Can We All Just Admit That Valentine's Day Is Terrible? twitter:description: "The best gift for Valentine's Day is to ignore it altogether" twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt800629d125635818/69887ced0a4a2207d69c84e5/valentine-dat-candy-hearts.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Can We All Just Admit That Valentine's Day Is Terrible? > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=7e0bd89f-08d3-4147-8648-5c75b5841c75&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_  by [Nancy Gibbs](https://time.com/author/nancy-gibbs/)  ## Nancy Gibbs Feb 10, 2016 11:00 PM UTC  Valentine candy hearts Valentine candy hearts Nicole Graether—Getty Images/Flickr RM  by [Nancy Gibbs](https://time.com/author/nancy-gibbs/)  ## Nancy Gibbs Feb 10, 2016 11:00 PM UTC _Nancy Gibbs is the editor of TIME. This piece was originally published in the February 7, 2008 issue of TIME._ I’m sentimental about many things: the lumpy feel of a baby’s unused feet, the metallic smell of the air before the first snow, the last scene in _It’s a Wonderful Life_. But Valentine’s Day leaves me cold. It’s a holiday that has no idea of what it’s really celebrating. Or at least no idea of whom it celebrates: St. Valentine could be any of half a dozen Christian martyrs whom the early church recruited to clean up and bless pagan fertility festivals. Of the top candidates, the best known is a priest named Valentinus, who was beheaded by Emperor Claudius the Cruel on Feb. 14, A.D. 269\. Upon slim evidence, whole layers of legend are stacked: that Valentinus performed secret weddings after Claudius banned marriage to prevent soldiers from deserting his armies; that he refused to deny Christ and so was thrown in prison, where he healed the jailer’s blind daughter; that he fell in love with her and left a note in the cracks of his cell the night before his execution, “From your Valentine.” **_Read more:_** [_What To Do If Your Partner Speaks a Different Love Language_](http://motto.time.com/4186078/love-languages/) Now martyrdom is admirable, even preferable, in a saint, but it is terrible in a relationship in which generosity demands payment in guilt. And a celebration that once featured bachelors pulling women’s names out of an urn like a door prize and a belief that the first person you spotted on the morning of Feb. 14 would be your mate for life doesn’t say much for romance. (Some maids were taught that if they awoke and saw a blackbird, they would marry a clergyman; a bluebird meant a poor man; a robin meant a sailor.) Over the years, Valentine became the patron saint of engaged couples and happy marriages, but also of beekeepers and, of course, greeting-card manufacturers. Love comes with a sting, and at a price. In the interests of domestic harmony, I should say that my wonderful husband has always handled the day’s customs with flair. Our daughters like it for the candy, which now comes in quantities rivaled only by Halloween, with Tootsie Rolls taped to the cards kids hand out. I have no problem with the holiday for 8-year-olds, now that it has shed its Darwinian savagery. Children are expected to bring a valentine for every classmate, unlike the days of our youth, when the teachers would collect the cards in a big red box and then call out names one by one, in a public accounting of exactly how many friends each child actually had. On the other hand, the idea of 8-year-olds’ celebrating a holiday that shimmies into view wearing a negligee does seem odd. But consider the huge commercial stakes: “The tradition of sending and receiving classroom valentines,” observes American Greetings, which owns a $1.8 billion piece of the “social expression” industry, “is often a child’s first experience with greeting cards.” A billion cards are sent every year, second only to Christmastime, and 85% of them by women. For this we can thank Esther Howland, an entrepreneurial 1847 Mount Holyoke grad, whose father owned a stationery store and who came up with the idea of mass-producing valentines. The Mother of the Valentine never married but did get very rich, racking up annual sales equivalent to more than $2 million today. For many of us, though, Valentine’s Day only pretends to celebrate what we like about love while actually undermining it. True romance comes unscheduled, unruly, “a madness most discreet,” quoth Romeo. Over time, as it ripens into devotion, still it improvises, a favor rendered, a sudden kiss, a private joke, flowers for no reason. Its expression is the very opposite of the fretful, “pre-order now, or be left with drugstore chocolates” connivances that the day promotes. For those who feel well loved, every day, of course, is Valentine’s. For the rest, no card can console. **_Read more:_** [_Why I’m Not Marriage Material_](http://motto.time.com/4202588/marriage-checklist/) That’s why the holiday lends itself so nicely to ridicule. Valentine’s Day has inspired its own insurgency, “Singles Awareness Day,” in which the unattached celebrate their solitude with a saucy “Happy SAD day.” Any holiday that triggers guerrilla opposition should give us pause. “Finding the right Valentine’s Day gift is probably the most difficult shopping experience in any man’s life,” warns [AskMen.com](http://askmen.com/) which notes that unlike Christmas or birthday presents, these gifts reflect not only taste and affection “but your degree of commitment as well.” Experts argue over subtexts: Is giving lingerie a turn-on or just tacky? Restaurants sweeten the menu and hike the prices; Christian websites offer valentine messages from God. You can buy a heart-shaped potato on eBay. It comes in a red box. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with delighting in love and honoring friendship and stopping in the bleak midwinter to tickle the people we love. But it’s also a good sign of psychosocial health if the day just saunters by and winks, and you feel no need to pay attention. The minute it feels like a duty, it has lost its purpose. “Love sought is good,” Shakespeare observed, “but given unsought is better.” ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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