Valentine’s Day: Love, loss and the illusion we’re sold

Love can feel like trying to decode a language you were never taught. If your childhood home lacked affection, every romantic gesture feels like a mirror reflecting what you never received. When affection was inconsistent or absent, relationships in adulthood can feel like chasing a shadow.

That’s why, for many of us, love can feel like both a yearning and a wound. It’s not just chocolates and roses-it’s something deeper, more human, and still hard to understand.

Embracing the so-called “month of love” can feel dishonest.

The month of love

Valentine’s Day is celebrated on 14 February, during what many call the month of love.

According to NPR, the origins of the day are far darker and more complex than the commercial romance we see today.

Valentine’s Day traces back to the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, where men would sacrifice animals and use the hides in rituals believed to promote fertility, reports NPR.

As one scholar told NPR, the men “were drunk. They were naked”, and women would line up to be struck, believing it would make them fertile.

That hardly sounds like the gentle love we package into heart-shaped boxes.

In addition, the Catholic Church later sought to Christianise the pagan festival by establishing St Valentine’s Day, honouring one or more martyrs named Valentine who were executed on February 14th.

Over time, poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer linked the date to romantic love, and by the 19th century, mass-produced cards helped commercialise the day.

In other words, what we now celebrate as romance evolved from ritual, martyrdom and marketing.

When love feels like a demand, not a bond

That history resonates with me not because it trivialises love, but because it exposes how easily “love” gets packaged.

We live in a time where declarations of love are measured by how much money we spend.

We’ve been sold the idea that if we don’t buy into Valentine’s Day, something is wrong with our capacity to love. That simply isn’t true.

For many, especially those who grew up in homes without consistent displays of love, Valentine’s Day is a painful reminder of what we didn’t have and still hope to find.

Relationships can fail not because people don’t want love, but because they are yearning for an echo of tenderness they never experienced, which other relationships can’t provide.

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Valentine’s Day not for everyone

So yes, I believe Valentine’s Day is not for everyone, or more so, myself. Sometimes it feels like a façade.

It’s okay to feel excluded from this commercial circus. Love isn’t a performance. And real love, the kind that heals, supports, and grows, doesn’t arrive on cue just because the calendar says so. Love happens in everyday moments, not at staged dinners or with obligatory gifts.

If Valentine’s Day gives us a chance to reflect, perhaps that’s its only real value – to ask: What is love to me, and how do I cultivate it for myself and those around me, beyond the 14th of February?

In a world that too often equates consumerism with affection, we must remember that love can be quiet, patient, and deeply personal-even when the world urges us to shout about it for profit.

Love can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be hollow.

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