Why I Hate Valentine’s Day: Reason #1

With the exception of February 19th, I'm not a huge fan of the "month of love."  Hell, if I could move my birthday out of this month I totally would.  So where does my hate for Valentine's Day stem (flower pun!) from?  Let's take a journey back to 1998, shall we?

Even before I knew I wanted to get into radio as a career, I was a nerd listening to it every night.  I grew up listening to Delilah on a station in my hometown and would fantasize about being in one of the incredible, against all odds love stories that I heard on her show when I got older.  (Clearly, I was much to young and naive to remember the stories of love that just didn't work out.)  At a very young age, I had this overly romanticized version of what relationships actually were like.  I've also been boy crazy since the 4th grade and had a huge crush on one of my classmates/CCD friends.  In my head, if he would just give me the chance, we'd live happily ever after with two kids and a dog in the yard.

Well, I was also tragically the ugly duckling growing up.  This boy was far more interested in my prettier best friend.  In fact, that happened with the next crush, the crush after that and well into our senior year of High School.  (Ironically, according to my Facebook research, she's getting married soon...and well you know how my love stories have played out.)  Our student council would sell carnations at lunch the week leading up to February 14th as a fundraiser.  You could send red carnations as a sign of love, pink carnations as a sign of friendship or yellow carnations as a sign you had a secret admirer.  I'd sit in homeroom every year hoping that just one of the boys I had a crush on felt the same way about me and spent $1 to send me a carnation...and I was disappointed every year.  I'd get to lunch and the prettier best friend had a small bouquet of five or six.  Pouting through the entire lunch period commenced.  The ugly duckling wasn't pretty enough to get to enjoy Valentine's Day flowers.  I've hated carnations and Valentine's Day ever since.

All these years later, do I realize this is a completely silly reason to hate Valentine's Day?  Yes, of course I do.  I've also grown up enough to realize that being pretty doesn't necessarily lead to finding prince charming and happily ever after.  Do I want to empower young women so they don't grow up thinking that their worth is rooted in vanity?  Absolutely.

But I still hate carnations.  And I still hate Valentine's Day.