This post was inspired by the sub-option for Day 14 of the Dungeons and Dragons 40th Anniversary Blog Hop. For the 14th, the option was presented to avoid the actual question–which had to do about significant others–and “protest” V-day with a random monster post.

I don’t understand hating Valentine’s Day. I’ve spent the majority of my V-days single, and one memorable one was spent getting back together with the girl who’d dumped me on my birthday ten days prior…and at leaaast once in between maybe?…because she didn’t want to be alone on Valentine’s Day. I think she dumped me by about 11:45pm. So I don’t come into pro-Valentine’s due to some sheltered existence of endlessly romantic, awesome celebrations.

I also get the commercial element of the holiday being distasteful to some folks. Same argument can be made for Halloween, though, and I rarely see people up in arms about how it’s a holiday with too much candy and too many horror movies.

But the thing is, Valentine’s Day has never been an issue for me. Its purpose, and value, has always seemed really clear. It’s the one day in the entire year when a person (dude, lady, whatever) in a relationship is being pushed/encouraged/reminded to do a sweet and romantic thing. Sure, that means single folks may feel shitty and sad, because they’re single–but in my experience, I pretty much felt that way anyway. Valentine’s Day wasn’t the one day in the year when I said “Shit! I’m alone and sad!” That was most of the days. One can also argue that birthdays and anniversaries also count here, but those don’t come factory standard installed up in your Dilbert Page-a-Day-Calendar. Remember those? I used to rock a Dave Barry one too. (Side-side note: At this point I had the horrible fear that Dave went as dark as Adams did, so there was some frantic skimming of the Wiki page. Looks like dude’s still cool though, and I was reminded that he’s where I got the phrase “That’d be a great name for a rock band.” Which explains the weird looks I get when I say that, since most people didn’t start reading Dave Barry at six.)

Anyway! My point is that on Valentine’s Day, somewhere, a dude/lady is finally giving their dude/lady a sweet acknowledgment of the special place that dude/lady holds in dude/lady’s heart. Maybe they’re not normally great at that. Maybe their dad wasn’t into hugs and their mom worked a lot, and it’s hard to express those feelings, but one year on the 14th it finally clicks and they do. So long as that’s happening somewhere, sometime, I consider the whole holiday worth it.