The other evening my wife and I hosted a great 'Year of the Tiger' Chinese New Year's party, mainly as an excuse to avoid the socially-mandated romantic duties of St. Valentine's Day. My cousin, his wife and their children who were in town for the weekend to visit my aunt were in attendance, and during the course of the party their older (5 year old) son handed out several Toy Story-themed valentine cards to me and other relatives. I thought nothing much of it at the time, but seeing them around again today made me think about it again. Why on St. Valentine's day, a 'holiday' devoted solely to reinforcing heteronormative sexual love and the romantic-industrial complex, are children expected to participate with obligatory cards and gifts?

Of course, the children's valentine cards are mainly about platonic friendship and earnest but naive confessions of 'puppy love'. And if Valentine's day was a day for celebrating all forms of love - companionable, familial, spiritual agape - I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with it. But these childish pretensions that St. Valentine's Day is for telling your friends and family how much you love them are soon cast aside for the adult world of chocolate, flowers, strained dinner dates and romantic comedies, uncomfortable underwear, dildos and awkward bedroom experiments. Which makes it seem all the more sinister (and more than a little suspect) that we indoctrinate children into the enforced celebration of St. Valentine's Day, getting in these messages of heteronormative romance as an annual sacrifice on the altar of mass conformity before they're even old enough to have sexual feelings.

Another thing I've noticed: my wife and I were only one of many couples who chose to be married on Halloween, and yet I've never once heard of anyone having a St. Valentine's Day wedding. Do I just not travel in the right circles?