Let’s Get This Over With As Quickly As Possible Day February 13, 2009
Posted by Onely in "Against Love"...?, As If!, Food for Thought, Heteronormativity, single and happy, Singled Out, Your Responses Requested!.Tags: feminist, hallmark, international quirkyalone day, LGTOWAQAP, new year's resolutions, nut sucking, progressive, singles awareness day, take our poll!, valentine's day, we love being single
trackback
This is Onely’s first Valentine’s Day! Pt-oo! And that is us spitting on the Hallmark and De Beers mudworms who warped the holiday into its current overcommercialized incarnation.
What can Onely say about V-day, aka Let’s Get This Over With as Quickly As Possible Day, that hasn’t been said already? “The holiday is insulting to singles”; “not insulting to singles”; “worth celebrating”; “not worth celebrating” — blah, blah.
And now, as co-authors of a progressive blog, we have yet another reason to be irritated with Valentine’s Day, because Onely feels obligated to come up with something profound to say about it. Every year, we hear the same old pro-or-against rhetoric and experience the same old delighted-or-depressed emotional swings as February 14th approaches. By the time you’re 34, it’s all just boring. (You may have noticed the same phenomenon happens with Christmas songs.)
Ok, so here goes: Regarding the various incarnations of LGTOWAQAP Day, Onely likes International Quirkyalone Day but finds Singles Awareness Day offensive (S.A.D.? give us a break). Onely does think that Valentine’s Day is second only to Groundhog Day for re-making all your New Years resolutions. Next chance to start practicing the saxophone half an hour every morning: St. Patrick’s Day!
Copious Readers, we want to know what your Valentine’s Day resolutions are. We also want to know what profound things Onely should blog about next year to help us get The Day over with as quickly as possible.
To get your creative juices flowing, here are some possibilities that we find intriguing – vote for your favorite and/or add your own suggestions!
* If you don’t know what we’re referring to when we suggest “Nut-Sucking” as a viable option, check this out!
— L & CC
Onely.Org 
As a secular humanist and a single by choice, I have similar reactions to Christ’s Mass and V-Day: The days are so ubiquitous, they are very difficult to ignore. Should an atheist celebrate Christmas? Some argue “yes” because they love Christmas trees. I’d rather not celebrate it. I go out to eat dim sum with a bunch of other freethinkers. So, somehow I end up “marking” the day. Same with Valentine’s Day: It’s impossible to ignore if even the lobby of my office building has VD candy (hehehe couldn’t resist using the abbreviation).
I wish everybody a happy Quirkyalone Day, which usually gets greeted with a chuckle, which isn’t quite the reaction I am looking for. Maybe we can embrace Valentine’s Day and be our own valentines! Maybe that would get the message across that loving and honoring ourselves is more important than getting sucked into commercialized holidays.
So, to mark this day, I reaffirm that I continue to fight singlism inside and out!
Enjoy today whether you give it special meaning or not!
I just remembered what Tom Flynn wishes people on X-mas: Happy Just Another Day!
Might be a good VDay wish, too!
Rachel– I definitely want to wish someone Happy Just Another Day sometime! I’m doing to do it on St. Patrick’s Day, which is the holiday I relate to the least, of all holidays (well, all the mass-produced holidays, anyway)
Sorry, I don’t mean to monopolize your comment section but this “prescription” at Washington Post is just too glaringly singlist to leave unmentioned: Extend your lifespan by marrying.
Email health@washpost.com if you don’t like this kind of nonsense either!
Valentines Day does not make me the least bit depressed, and like Onely, I think it’s discriminatory aspects have become a dull topic of conversation. The only thing I have a major problem with, however, is how you CAN’T DO ANYTHING on Valentine’s Day. It’s Saturday night and everyone I know is doing Valentiney things. I kinda just sorta started seeing someone, but I can’t ask him if he wants to hang out tonight (see: 30 Rock from this past week), all the restaurants and movie theaters just get packed, and if you go out alone, even though you’re not depressed, people think you are!
Laurie–It’s TRUE! It just adds a silly layer of awkwardness and innuendo. –CC
I read the article at the Washington Post and got the impression it was mainly a parody of drug ads, not a serious endorsement of marriage.
The article was definitely a parody, and I thought it actually came out anti-marriage and funny. *However* the problem was that there was a banner box that was *not* couched in ironic, funny terms: the box stood out from the rest of the text and contained a statement, in large bold colored type, that cited some crappy but well-publicized study that supposedly found that married people live longer. If that banner hadn’t been there, the message of the article would have been much more benign and amusing.
V-day is like any other holiday…often we adopt the expectations of the social norm out of obligation rather than true deference. I spent a wonderful night with my brother and another couple across from us at a 5 course dinner. We talked about how it was the perfect pairing, but how many people would have assumed “couples” would want to spend the night alone…
[…] holiday (LGTOWAQAP Day for short), featured the quintessential anti-valentine, Death Bear, and even polled our readers for what we should do about this small annoyance. But this year, we’ve decided to do something […]
I like Valentine’s Day. I like it when I’m not single (meaning, I have a boyfriend, not that I’m married) and I like it when I am single (like right now). I think it’s fun. I share V-Day with all the people I like; we don’t have to be shtupping. For me, it’s lighthearted and playful.