If you ask anyone around the world the date on which Valentine’s Day falls and the chances of you getting a wrong answer would be one in millions. In fact, the very concept of celebrating Valentine’s Day has become so engrained in modern society that no one really even knows that the day is named after a Christian saint who most probably didn’t use the day to buy his wife flowers and chocolate in the hopes of getting lucky on that particular date in midwinter! That being said, there are a lot of motivations that make people celebrate V-Day.
It’s a remnant of very old traditions
Most ancient cultures, including the now-obscure pagan ones, the time around spring was celebrated with a lot of enthusiasm and it was considered a good time for functions like weddings too. Social gatherings held around spring allowed members of a community to get boys and girls of marriageable age together and make matches. Over time, these matchmaking and mate-picking traditions turned into what we celebrate as Valentine’s Day today.
To celebrate romantic love
In the modern times, people use Valentine’s Day to celebrate romantic love. While the same can be celebrated any other day of the year too, the fact that it is near-universally acclaimed as a day for celebrating love makes any celebration on the day all the more special as well.
Pop culture tells us we need to celebrate it
Like most modern days of celebration, Valentine’s Day is also a product of marketing gimmicks created by greeting card manufacturers, florists and chocolate makers. The day has been mythologized through repetition in pop culture as well which makes people believe that it is necessary to celebrate the day in some form to prove that they haven’t entirely given up on romance and their sex lives.
