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Valentines Day goes ‘red’
February 15th, 2009 at 02:04
Today was Valentine’s Day. You might have noticed the extra-affection couples were showing for each other in public just to make sure that everyone is totally sure that they’re totally in love with each other.
Don’t take this commentary as some sort of bitter snipe – I too was acting affectionately in the public to the person I love the most in the world. I spent the day wandering around central London loudly remarking to strangers on my own brilliant wit and dashing good looks.
What makes writing about Valentines day particularly difficult is that as far as I can tell, it’s very ease to lapse into being tedious. For single people like myself, it’d be easy to come across sounding bitter and twisted, and people in relationships would struggle to write about it without sounding smug. Worse still, there’s the inevitable risk of expressing some really boring opinions:
“Valentines day is so commercial… it’s just an excuse for the shops to sell greetings cards and tat, blah blah blah”.
Slow down a moment Bill Hicks, you’re blowing my mind with your insight.
The unfortunate thing about having such a boring opinion is that it is invariably correct. Relationships – as after all, this is what the whole thing is about – are an inherently capitalist construct. The fierce competition for finding a romantic partner – the private partnerships that are formed, and the falling interest rate when the relationship stagnates… sound familiar?
And this is setting aside the systematic inequalities that the free market for relationships brings about. Ugly and unpleasant people are put at an automatic disadvantage by the circumstances of their birth. Which goes against the socialist mantra that everyone is born equal. Just as those from poor backgrounds are denied access to the best schools, the best universities and the top jobs, ugly people are denied access to the most attractive of romantic partners. Obviously there are going to be some outliers – self-made millionaires and the fact that John Prescott has managed to have two affairs and a wife – but these are the exceptions and not the rule.
Having identified this problem, we must find a solution that will make things fairer. We need to re-distribute love from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
If I were a good socialist, I’d no doubt advocate some sort of revolution in the structure of human society, with the state intervening and allocating people romantic partners – appointing Cilla Black as the Nanny in the nanny state or something. As I’m a bad socialist, and the product of Blair’s Britain however, I’ve got a much more modest proposal – a third way - that can be implemented through incremental changes within the established framework of interpersonal relationships. We only need to change one day out of the whole year.
I’m down on one knee and proposing that we inject some emotional socialism into February 14th. We change it from a day where couples consolidate their affections for each other (the only “trickle-down” effects of this arrangement are going to be unpleasant) into a day where couples have to cheer up their single friends. It’d be dead easy – Valentines day is already pretty red as it is, so wouldn’t need too many alterations, and we can know that people will take to this new arrangement because if you were to ask any hardcore Marxist today what it was like working on a collectivised farm in the Soviet Union, they’ll tell you it was a paradise on earth – a strongly romanticised memory and a completely irrational assertion… just what is needed in any relationship.
I don’t think this new plan can fail. Just like socialism, this will definitely work.
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