Some people love Valentine’s Day—and when we say love, we mean *love*. They’ll seize the opportunity to show their appreciation and love for their significant other in the form of grand gestures, flowers, chocolate, fancy dinners—you know how it goes. Some die-hard Valentine’s Day fans even consider the holiday a celebration of friends and family too—not just a day for lovers.
Other, more cynical people don’t just think the holiday is downright cheesy or trivial—they think it’s a corporate-fueled gambit designed to guilt people into spending money.
If you’ve been down a Reddit rabbit hole once or twice, you know that Redditors aren’t afraid to get passionate about topics they like—and loathe. We figured, what better place to turn to to find out people’s genuine feelings toward the day of love than Reddit? To find out, we—quite literally—pored through nearly 1,000 Reddit comments related to Valentine’s Day.
Whether or not they believed Valentine’s Day is a consumer-driven pseudo-holiday, more Redditors felt pessimistic toward the day of love than positive or neutral. 50% of comments were negative, 37% were positive, and 13% were neutral. To illustrate just how passionately Redditors feel about the topic, we included quotes from this Reddit thread down below.
50% of Redditors Dislike Valentine’s Day or Feel it Doesn’t Deserve “Holiday” Status
On the whole, Valentine’s Day haters feel it’s a holiday only for those struck by Cupid’s arrows. People also argued that the world should celebrate love and treat the important people in their lives lovingly every day of the year—not just on one meaningless day in the dead of winter.
Perhaps the greatest argument against it is that the holiday feels commercialized—a ruse designed to raise expectations and cause people to spend more and more.
As one Redditor put it, “[Valentine’s Day] is totally pointless, serves no purpose, does not benefit society in any way and probably the only reason it continues to exist is down to the number of businesses using it as an excuse to cash in.”
Another V-Day hater went on to further explain that, in their opinion, Valentine’s Day is just “Another made-up holiday like Mother’s Day, intended to get the masses to buy chocolates and flowers, dinners out and the like.”
Valentine’s Day Lovers Appreciate the Excuse to Shower Their S.O. with Love (Plus Next-Day Discounted Chocolate)
More people on Reddit feel positive than neutral towards Valentine’s Day. 37% of comments reflected positive sentiments, while only 13% of comments reflected blasé attitudes.
Many Valentine’s Day lovers enjoy the opportunity to lean into romantic clichés—or they appreciate the steeply discounted next-day chocolate sales.
Don’t believe us? Here are quotes we pulled from Redditors speaking on the matter:
- “I am the mushiest person ever so I enjoy having a day where it’s not weird for me to write a card saying all the little things I love about my SO.”
- “The real holiday is February 15…when all the candy goes on sale.”
- “You may celebrate birthdays, holidays and other achievements but a good relationship is an achievement!”
Those that feel indifferent toward Valentine’s Day claim that they don’t feel passionately one way or the other toward the subject since “you can make [Valentine’s Day] as big or small as you want.” Others barely notice the holiday, citing that they “tend to forget about it, the same way [they] forget about Saint Patrick’s Day.”
More Redditors Associate the Word “Lonely” with Valentine’s Day than “Relationship”
Many of the words prominent in Reddit contained common keywords associated with V-Day: “chocolate,” “love,” and “Hallmark” to name a few.
57% of the comments that mentioned the word “chocolate,” or “Valentine’s chocolate” were positive-leaning—perhaps because chocolate is an affordable, crowd-pleasing gift that’s hard to mess up. Regardless of the reason, chocolate flies off the shelves every February. In 2019 alone, consumers spent $20.6 billion on chocolate for Valentine’s Day.
“Lonely” also cropped up in numerous comments—83% of comments used the word in a negative context. Many people cited Valentine’s Day as a way for happily married or taken people to rub their successful relationships in the faces of those without one. In that same vein, “single” appeared in the Reddit thread dozens of times too; 55% of those mentions leaned negative as well.
According to the Washington Post, more people aged 18–34 are single than taken. 51% of people 18–34 consider themselves single, with an even split of respondents interested in dating and respondents content on their own.
Redditors repeatedly used the phrase “another day” to describe V-Day as well, with 55% of those mentions using it in a negative light. Although some of those comments were neutral and indicated that someone felt indifferent toward the day of love, several Redditors used it to highlight their belief that the day itself has no significant meaning and shouldn’t be treated as a real holiday.
Methodology
To find out what people really think of the day of love, we took to Reddit: a place where people freely—and passionately—share their opinions.
We analyzed Reddit user u/jc0187’s Reddit thread, “How do people ACTUALLY feel about Valentine’s Day?” There were over 885 comments—all of which we included in our analysis. We threw out comments that were conversational in nature or didn’t directly answer the question, and went through each individual comment to determine which were positive, negative, or neutral.
How Do You Feel About Valentine’s Day?
As internet providers, we love sleuthing through what people have to say online. With that, we want to know: Are you Team Cupid’s Arrow, Team “That’s a Hard No,” or Team Indifferent?
Please leave your opinion (no matter how grinchy or mushy it may be!) in the comments section below.
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