Love as Resistance: In Defiance of Valentine’s Day

With every new year comes another Valentine’s Day, and with another Valentine’s Day comes the tirades against the corporate devaluation of love and the depiction of romance as a heteronormative, capitalist competition of “who has someone to love in the way Hollywood has deemed the most important.”

And to these disgruntled ones, I say keep it up.

It isn’t just that I agree with their message. I absolutely believe that Valentine’s Day has been used for corporate profit, to debase the meaning of love in our culture. The most important part of this anger, however, is the vocal resistance to what Valentine’s Day has come to represent and force upon us.

Given everyone voicing their opinions about what love means all on one day, Valentine’s Day has come to serve an important purpose. For those of us who have begun to tire of corporate messages, Valentine’s Day has created an important opportunity for us to face our own definitions of what love and family mean to us, and created a space for consideration and action on the principles of love. What if we could use this space, where one day a year we are coerced into considering what it means to love, to reflect on the possibilities of what it can mean to love deeply?

It is easy to devalue this possibility because buying into a corporate holiday is free marketing, regardless of how much we rage. And of course holidays and finding reasons to celebrate love aren’t inherently bad. However, the version of love that Valentine’s Day preaches is limited and materialistic, centered on showing affection for one significant other by buying them presents. This narrow idea of love doesn’t speak to the possibilities for the kinds of love that encourage empathy, friendship, and solidarity. But there is also potential for us to re-appropriate this holiday to define love for ourselves, and to celebrate in defiance, rather than cooperation, of corporate values.

Love can be a great act of resistance against our capitalist, imperialist culture, if we define it for ourselves. If, one day a year, we ponder the insult that V-Day presents to genuine, heartfelt acts of compassion and love, we will also find ourselves describing what genuine compassion and love are to us. And what I have found, scrolling through personal blog posts and Facebook statuses, is that many of us concur that love is organic and revolutionary, and that love should be expressed every day of the year.

Love is radical. Love is spiritual. Love is a deep connection that links individuals. Love inspires us to fight the oppression that tries to divide us among race, gender, and class lines, along borders, and by our professions. What would the world look like if we remembered to extend our love to people whose stories we don’t know personally? Once a year, the same entities that benefit from these divisions try to sell us a watered down, synthetic version of this revolutionary force in order to con us into buying flowers, chocolate, and jewelry to fuel their own power. And once a year, many of us try to articulate why that makes us so angry.

And what if our anger gives us permission to fall in love with ourselves, reminds us that love is not limited to someone one is dating, and inspires us to show affection without giving money to corporations? This ridiculous holiday serves as a reminder that we are being swindled, that capitalism is trying to define our values for us. And we are given the choice to say “no” and decide for ourselves what we want to believe.

So what if, as we rethink our definitions of love, we begin to include ourselves, our families and friends, and the people we meet? As people begin to fight back against corporate holidays, instead of scrambling to find dates, more and more of us have begun to resist, focusing on loving ourselves and each other in a world that teaches us we are not worthy of love the way we are. Amidst a culture that tells us we are too fat, too thin, too dumb, too lazy, too black, too white, too imperfect; in a country that labels us sluts, as illegal aliens, as criminals and thugs; in a nation where every day we are told you are not good enough, on this day a sea of voices rise up to say “Enough with your corruption. I get to decide what love means to me.” We stand up to define our own meanings of love, and the reclaiming of this space that V-Day forcibly creates, however small, is an act of resistance.