Valentine’s Day is less a celebration of love these days, and more an annual festival of normalising the bare minimum. A day when women, en masse, convince themselves that a bouquet grabbed on the way home from work and a dinner “because that’s what you do” count as proof of affection. Expect anything more and it gets labelled as entitlement. And in the end, the familiar slogan always wins: it’s the thought that counts.
Although another line is breaking through more and more often: we have Valentine’s Day every day. A softer, prettier way of saying, “He didn’t take me anywhere, but it’s fine, because it’s not about that.” If it truly isn’t about that, why post about it on social media at all?
The bar isn’t just on the floor.
It lives there.
The bare minimum as the romantic ideal of our era
There’s something fascinating about how low we can set expectations and then call meeting them “love”. He doesn’t cheat? Brilliant. He replies? Wow. He remembers your birthday and Valentine’s Day? Husband of the year material. Basic decency has been repackaged as luxury, and the absence of harm as proof of devotion.
The bare minimum has been sold to women as emotional maturity. Don’t overreact. Don’t be dramatic. Intentions matter. Intentions sound lovely in theory, but without follow-through they remain a fantasy, not a relationship. More like a story you tell yourself so you don’t have to ask uncomfortable questions or raise the bar, because raising it might cost you peace.
Valentine’s Day is perfect for keeping that illusion alive. One day can neatly seal up an entire year of mediocrity. One photo, one bouquet, one evening, covering everything that didn’t happen over the other three hundred and sixty-four days.
It’s a bit like tidying one room in a house that’s falling apart, then taking a photo for Instagram with the caption: home sweet home.
Flowers aren’t the problem. The job they’ve been hired to do is
Most women like receiving flowers. It’s worth saying plainly, without the performative distance. Flowers are beautiful. Fragile. Short-lived. They smell good, take up space, change the atmosphere of a room. They send a simple signal: someone thought of me, someone paused, someone chose something. They work on a very primal level. They were never emotionally neutral, and that’s exactly why they’re so effective.
The problem starts elsewhere. Flowers aren’t the language of a relationship. They’re the language of symbolism. Their meaning works culturally, not personally. A bouquet “means something” because we’ve all collectively agreed that it does. It’s a gesture. A message. Even if no one can fully articulate what it’s meant to be saying.
It’s no coincidence we give the same flowers to the dead. We place them in spaces where dialogue has ended. Where there’s no reply and no relationship in the classic sense, and yet there’s still a need to leave a trace. A sign. Proof of presence that requires no response, but offers the comfort of “something has been done”.
And that’s where it gets uncomfortable. If flowers work best where there’s no conversation, no continuity, no real relationship, it’s easy to see why they’re so often used as a substitute in relationships that are emotionally dead or suspended. A symbol copes better than a word. Better than daily presence. Better than a change in behaviour.
Flowers are aesthetic and delicate, but they’re also convenient. They make no demands. You don’t have to live with them. You don’t have to understand them. They don’t force confrontation. They appear, make an impression, disappear. They leave no consequences. They’re perfect for relationships that don’t want a reckoning, only a short-term effect.
That doesn’t mean flowers are empty. It means they’re easy. Easier than a conversation. Easier than responsibility. That’s why they work so well in moments of tension, crisis, and emotional debt. They become a symbolic currency in relationships that refuse to settle the real account.
No wonder they’ve become the central prop of Valentine’s Day. This holiday doesn’t require continuity. It requires a gesture. One day. One image you can remember, photograph, and treat as proof that love was present, even if only for a moment.
More and more women can now like flowers and still not believe in what they’re supposed to represent. Appreciate the bouquet and know it solves nothing. It doesn’t replace conversation, daily care, or a real relationship. Symbols make an impression, but they never last for long.
Valentine’s Day as a day of collective gaslighting
Valentine’s Day has a uniquely perverse way of flipping responsibility on its head. Instead of asking about the quality of the relationship, it focuses on the woman’s reaction. Instead of checking what isn’t working, it invites everyone to check whether she’s overreacting. The flowers are there. The dinner is there. The gesture has been made.
On this one day, disappointment turns into ingratitude, and needs become a drama. If something feels off, the problem becomes the reaction, not the situation. The whole structure exists to dull intuition and shift the centre of gravity from the relationship to self-judgement.
This mechanism didn’t come from love. It was designed. By marketing, by commerce, by people who understood one thing: the easiest product to sell is the one that turns absence into shame. No gift equals no love. No flowers equals no value. No dinner equals personal failure.
A woman who receives nothing doesn’t just have an ordinary day. She gets a suspicion that something is wrong with her. Shame replaces anger. Rationalising pushes questions aside. It’s only a day. It’s not about presents. Love doesn’t need dates. And yet everything around her insists on the opposite.
The most disgusting part of this system is how it gets sold as romance. The more expensive, the more you love. The more public, the more real. The more you spend, the greater the value of the feeling. That isn’t love. That’s a ranking. And rankings always work in favour of the people who created them.
If you received nothing, it doesn’t mean no one loves you.
If no one put on a show, it doesn’t mean you lost.
And if this whole circus makes you angry, it means one thing: you can see the mechanism.
No one will love you more than you do when you stop buying other people’s definitions of love. Not because of fashionable self-love. Because of clarity. No advert, no date, and no bouquet can give you what clear sight gives you.
Everything else is just an expensive proof of who got pulled into it.
