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Valentine’s Day is on its way. For happy couples that means dinner dates, flowers and not going to bed alone. Last year I gave advice to the guys out there who wanted to avoid castration by high-heeled pump. This year, I thought I would talk to the ladies.
It is important to remember Valentine’s Day is a holiday created for two
purposes.
First, women like gifts and the ideal V-Day that is shown in jewelry commercials and Lifetime movies is not likely to actually ever happen. As with most things that we idealize, it is never as great as we imagine.
It is almost impossible for your guy to read your mind, so cut him a break and don’t expect him to pull your perfect evening out of the hat if you don’t tell him what you want.
Just be happy he is doing anything at all for a holiday he likely finds a little ridiculous and move on. Maybe next year you should try to celebrate a holiday that means a lot to him, like the Super Bowl or opening day of pheasant season.
Second, the point of Valentine’s Day is not to make you happy, and you know it. The point of Valentine’s Day is to impress your female friends with how much your boyfriend loves you.
As the jewelry companies have been teaching us for years, gifts equate love, and the person with the most gifts is the most loved. You want to make your single friends eat chocolate and cry while wishing for a boyfriend and gloat in the face of your coupled-up friends whom didn’t get the princess treatment.
Similar to male penis measuring, women compare the behavior of their men to place themselves in a social hierarchy. For most of the year, the goal is to prove your boyfriend causes you to suffer more than any other girl who has ever put up with bad male behavior, but on Valentine’s Day that all changes.
The new goal becomes to prove you’ve managed to snag the best man in the batch. Those girls who have bad V-Day experiences will have to resort to clambering for social position using the suffering model that doesn’t hold during the holiday of love.
Try sending yourself the gifts that you so desperately want, and think you need, whether it be flowers, jewelry, candy, singing telegrams or whatever else your little heart desires. Consider the social position you will gain by having a man dressed as cupid sing of your unending beauty as you sit in the MUC eating your delightful Aramark dinner.
You don’t have to tell anyone where these gifts come from, but simply hint at the existence of a secret admirer. I personally will be pretending the flowers my mother sent for my birthday are from some handsome and mysterious stranger. If you can’t get someone to build your self esteem, then just do it yourself.
Reach Melissa Johnson at Melissa.A.Johnson@usd.edu
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