The other day, a friend of mine -- a relatively recent immigrant from a country where Valentine's Day isn't really a Thing -- asked me what the deal was with this peculiar American holiday.
For a minute I thought about giving him the cynical, flip answer: that it's a fake commercial holiday invented to keep jewelers and chocolate manufacturers afloat. But that isn't what I actually believe (you'll be shocked, shocked! to know that it's a bit wordier and more complicated than that) and also I didn't know that it would really answer his question, so I begged off and said I'd blog about it sometime.
So here is what I really believe: that Valentine's Day is a stress test for relationships, and also that it's an interesting insight into what happens when you ask (mostly) men to perform emotional labor within those relationships.
A stress test, in the medical context, usually means asking the patient to undergo some mild physical exertion in order to put a little extra stress on the heart and thereby reveal problems that might otherwise go unnoticed. If you're healthy, a stress test is nothing. But if you're not, it can be alarming -- and not infrequently, you might have thought you were just fine, only to discover that, if you subject the system to a little extra demand, there's something amiss after all.
That's what V-Day is to relationships. The extra pressure of societal expectations to Do Something Romantic and the near-universal human temptation to compare your situation to your friends' and peers' creates a little extra stress that isn't otherwise there (sure, there are other stereotypical romantic occasions like anniversaries, but they don't all fall on the same day for everyone and thus don't impose the same pressure to compare; you'd never go to a restaurant and know that every other couple at every other table was celebrating their anniversary too).
If your relationship is healthy, your communications are clear, and your expectations are aligned, V-Day is easy, even fun. It's an excuse to do something nice for each other, or to affirm your own relationship by making fun of everybody else doing stuff.
But if your relationship is new and fragile, then it's hard to know how much stress it can withstand. And if you're not in great shape and there are deeper underlying problems, they're likely to buckle and crack under the strain.
It's these uncertainties that make V-Day as profitable as it is. It isn't the people in secure relationships who make V-Day profitable (the ones who like doing stuff spend money on each other anyhow; the ones who don't care about it aren't going to be pressured into dropping dollars on a holiday they perceive as fake). It's the insecure ones. People spend money on V-Day because they're trying to buy strength into their relationship.
This isn't meant to be a criticism, btw. Sometimes it's actually a very good idea, and sometimes it works. Sometimes it's inevitable (if you've only been dating someone for a couple of months, you can't have as strong a relationship as someone who's been happily married for 20 years; you simply don't have that reservoir of shared time). But the fact is, people who only spend money on V-Day are doing that because they're trying to buy what they don't already have, and what is not actually possible to purchase directly.
Which brings me to my second point: V-Day is pretty interesting in what it says about how difficult it is for (some) American men to perform emotional labor in relationships.
The general dynamic in most relationships (and let me underline that it's general, and I know there are plenty of exceptions, but generally I still think this is true) is that the woman does most of the emotional labor, by which I mean that she's the one who is primarily responsible for maintaining social connections, being "fun," and "keeping the romance alive." More often than not, it's women who arrange social plans for the couple, who write the thank-you notes and everyday emails to their friends and family, who stereotypically make the candelit dinners and wear the expensive lingerie and make sure their toenails are painted and don't "let themselves go" and all of that.
(Again: I realize I'm generalizing. I realize that social norms are, however slowly, changing. I realize there are plenty of men, especially young men, who take an active role in these things. That's great! But by and large, for decades, women in This Dumb Society have been conditioned by TV shows and movie rom-coms and well-meaning peers to feel like they have an obligation to be pretty and vivacious and maintain the relationship's romance as part of their feminine role [and if you don't do it, you know you aren't doing it, and you probably made that choice intentionally vs. doing it automatically without a moment's awareness that it was anything other than "normal"], and by and large, men have not been subject to the same pressures in the same way.)
V-Day is the one day a year where that expectation is reversed. The expectation on V-Day is that the man will be the one who does the primary romantic gesture, whether that's taking his girlfriend out on the town or bringing home a box of chocolates or surprising his wife with a diamond necklace or whatever. It's pretty explicit in the way this holiday is marketed that the man is supposed to do something romantic on Valentine's.
And that is really interesting to me, because the main thing you see as a result is that lots and lots of men have no idea how to be romantic. They just don't have the emotional vocabulary for it. They don't have any independent conception of what this is supposed to mean or how you would even articulate it.
So, lacking a real ability to express themselves on a deeper level, they buy the pre-packaged sentiment. They let greeting cards do their talking, and they let chocolates do their courting, and they let more expensive presents stand in for any deeper sentiments that they might want to share. And what should be a thoughtful and individualized expression of a unique and special relationship with a unique and special person instead gets transmuted, literally, into a mass-produced commodity. Whatever you wanted to say is trammeled and limited by the options available on the shelf, and many men never even consider that they might want to express themselves in some other way.
And then -- and this is really interesting to me too -- there's a certain resentment, half joking but half not, about doing even that, because doing emotional labor is hard (it's work! that's why they call it "labor"!) and it's frequently not something guys are accustomed to doing, and when you have to do something hard and unfamiliar on cue because Society Says So, then the natural unexamined reaction is to look for a way out of it.
It's so common to hear guys joking about how they "have to" do something for Valentine's that I think even guys who want to do things often feel obligated to shrug it off, like they're only doing it because they have to. There's a lot of joking about how much money you have to spend, or how you totally almost forgot about it because lol who pays attention to Valentine's, or how you forgot and your girlfriend never let you hear the end of it and women, so emotional and needy, amirite?!
The upshot of all this is that men often go to their significant others with some version of "honey, V-Day is a fake commercial holiday anyway, you don't really need a dumb card and a box of drugstore chocolates, do you?" And women feel a pressure to be agreeable, to not be emotional-and-needy, to signal that they're easy to get along with and not shrewish or demanding, so plenty of them will laugh and shrug it off and say "no, of course not!"
Some of them mean that. Some of them don't. Lots of them say it and think they mean it and then wonder, later, why they feel unappreciated when everybody knows that Valentine's is a fake holiday and they genuinely don't care for flowers or diamonds. And then their boyfriends or husbands might wonder why they're being frozen out when they talked about this and everybody agreed not to do anything for Valentine's.
The answer is that it isn't about the cards or the chocolates. It's about signifying to the woman that she's appreciated, and that the relationship is worth putting time and effort (and, yes, sometimes money -- but money is the paradoxically cheapest option here; time and effort count for more) into. It's about recognizing that this holiday is an externally imposed social ritual of no significance in and of itself (so by all means, skip out on it if that's what you both want to do), but it is also and because of that a stress test for your relationship, and ignoring it may mean ignoring a valuable early warning that something deeper and more serious is at risk.
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