Happy Valentine's Day?

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Up till my late teens, Valentine’s Day was a stranger to me – I had never seen it, never heard of it. Growing up under the Soviet regime, I was ‘programmed’ to know only the Soviet holidays, see only the Soviet cartoons and learn history only from the Soviet perspective. Although this locked-in environment of communism had disadvantages, through years I’ve come to appreciate its strictness and sober moral norms, as they saved a good portion of my childhood innocence.

I came to know the Valentine’s Day through the several times I went for studies to America. Coming from a country, which had just shaken off the chains of the communist regime, I found America with its pompous culture of exaggerated celebrations as quite alien to me. I felt somewhat lost in the dating culture tension of high school life and the many high school dances, in which only ‘couples’ were allowed. “Sweethearts Dance” for celebrating the Valentine’s Day was pretty much about showing off to the rest of the school that your ‘special person’, who was your date for the evening. All the talks of celebrating the beauty of love faded into the background of plain and straight-forward propaganda of teenage dating culture.

Later, during the years of my university studies, I learned yet new angles of what Valentine’s Day means for common Americans. Living in Minneapolis, which has “The Mall of America” (the biggest shopping mall in the country), I could very clearly see, how businesses are cashing in big time on people’s romantic feelings of love. Sasha, my exchange student friend from Russia, who was working at “The Mall”, honestly admitted that the holiday seasons are a nightmare for her. Be it Easter, Christmas or Valentine’s Day, the whole mall was transforming into a money sucking machine, mesmerizing the unaware customers with Christmas trees, eggs, bunnies, hearts and the music of the season into opening their wallets for the sake of… spending money, of course! If for customers the red hearts and love songs added a pleasant touch to their Valentine’s Day’s shopping spree, then in Sasha such daily diet created a clear aversion.

My American roommate Sarah, a graduate student of sociology, quite shocked me with her perception of what Valentine’s Day could be about. One day, as we were sitting and talking in our living-room, she showed me some booklets on ‘safe’ sex and said that she would mail them as the Valentine’s Day present to her niece, who had just entered her teens. “Nobody else is going to tell her about this anyway, so I thought I should help her out,” was Sarah’s rationale behind this her intention. I found it hard to believe my own ears. So I learned that Valentine’s Day can also be about promoting the responsibility and commitment free partnerships.

However, the hardest I was hit by the reality of this partnership culture through my other roommate Cathy, a Ph.D. student of geophysics. Cathy was a very bright student, but she had some psychological issues and was on daily anti-depressant drugs. For most of the January university vocation that year, I was out of the country, so I was unaware of what was going on in her life. One evening, just a few days after I returned, Cathy came to me with a bottle of medicines in her hand and asked me to count, how many pills were left in there. After I counted, she realized that about thirty pills were missing. She told me that her boy-friend had left her and she felt so depressed that she just kept on taking these pills in attempt to calm down her emotions. Thanks God I had a driver’s license and could drive her in her own car to the nearest hospital emergency room, from where she was transferred for a few days to the psychiatric ward, because doctors had diagnosed her as attempting to commit suicide… With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I was not ready to buy into talks of spreading love in humanity, because with my own eyes I had seen the reality of the dating culture this celebration stands for.
May be my angle on Valentine’s Day is quite an unusual one, but it is the one that I have come to experience. So whenever I hear ‘Happy Valentine’s Day!’ I feel like this sentence should end with a question mark.

Avots: http://www.hibamagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=571&Itemid=125