For some reason, I’ve never understood the hype around Valentine’s Day. It may have something to do with the fact that my parents never bothered to celebrate it. I received those pink, heart-shaped candies just once during my entire childhood — and I believe they were given to me by my grandmother. No middle-school boy ever told me I was his Valentine, and our friendship would have ended there if he had.
Or perhaps my childhood has nothing to do with it, and I’m simply not a romantic kind of person.
Needless to say, the fact that St. Valentine’s feast day happens to fall on Ash Wednesday this year doesn’t bother me in the slightest — and in speaking to married friends of mine, I quickly discovered it doesn’t bother them either. (One of these friends of mine informed me that he and his wife don’t celebrate and he finds the day obnoxious since his boys manage to leave red tinsel and love notes all over the house. I do hope he got his wife some roses.)
But dedicating a day to love does have a purpose in society — at least as far as journalists and sociologists are concerned — it’s a perfect excuse to check in on the status of love, loneliness, and marriage. The vital signs are not good.
Concerningly, we’re still experiencing an epidemic of loneliness. In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murphy claimed that “about one in two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness.” For a while, we could blame COVID lockdowns — but we’re far enough away from the last that we should probably start looking into other explanations.
It’s easy to say that Americans are simply less friendly than they used to be (when was the last time you struck up a conversation with your neighbor?), that they’re less involved in their church communities, and that social media has cheapened both remote and in-person relationships. But those are symptoms, not causes, of the problem.
The bigger issue is that our society has been subjected to decades of anti-marriage propaganda. Women are told that they can only be successful if they make it to the C-suite of a major company (they frequently discover that women don’t find happiness in those C-suites), men are warned that women have the upper hand if the relationship goes sideways (marriage is a trap, Andrew Tate says), and both are told that being tied down is likely to make them unhappy.
The problem with these narratives, which Brad Wilcox masterfully debunks over at the Free Press, is that they attack the fundamental building block of society: the family.
Sure, dating is tough (just ask Gen Z), and building a family is even more difficult, but there are few things in life quite as rewarding — both for the individual and for society.
I’m not sure what marriage and romance have to do with a man who was beheaded in the third century, but St. Valentine’s feast day is as good an excuse as any to send someone some roses — and because it’s Ash Wednesday, you don’t even have to include the chocolate.
This article is an excerpt from The American Spectator’s Spectator P.M. newsletter. Subscribe today to read future letters from our staff!
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