Step outside and take a deep breath: do you smell that? It’s love! It’s finally the season of pink candy and cartoony hearts, where we get together and celebrate our love for our significant others. But what if I told you it’s a total sham? Despite the loving atmosphere of the month, many more breakups happen in the season of love than you’d expect.
The media leads us to believe that love can be found everywhere—and that each relationship is perfect no matter what struggles they face. Most Disney classics have a romantic subplot that creates such a magical view of what a relationship looks like. Too bad getting into a relationship with someone isn’t as easy as just singing a duet together or kissing a sleeping chick in the middle of the woods somewhere.
Life is more complicated than what Disney shows us, and this is especially true around Valentine’s Day. For example, the TV show The Office has a great example of Valentine’s Day not being all it’s cracked up to be. The characters Jim and Pam are in a “Will they? Won’t they?” situationship, despite Pam being engaged to Roy. Their relationship in the first three seasons is the perfect example that you can’t always be with who you truly want. Pam and Roy are in love, but are clearly not meant for each other, as there is a lack of communication and effort put into the relationship. Phyllis and Bob Vance are a couple that contrasts Pam and Roy’s dynamic. The season 2 episode about Valentine’s Day (episode 16) shows this contrast. Phyllis and Bob are shown as the perfect married couple, as Bob showers Phyllis with excessive amounts of gifts–flowers, chocolates, and even a comically large dog, and Pam is seen as being jealous of them as she delivers all of these gifts to Phyllis while she gets nothing from her fiance. Valentine’s Day makes their very different situations clearer, because instead of being a time where love blooms, it is a time where love is put under pressure.
Valentine’s day is a time for appreciation and adoration between partners—and spending a boat-load of money on gifts. A reoccuring struggle many face during the holiday season is figuring out what gift to get their partners. Sometimes, the stress of the season tends to drive people to end the relationship quicker than expected to avoid any overwhelming feelings. Senior Joey Russell had a sad experience with this. She said, “My boyfriend broke up with me a week before Valentine’s Day, but on the bright side I got to eat his chocolate that I bought him—-It hurt because I felt like he waited so that he wouldn’t have to put effort in for the holiday.”
As you can see, there tends to be some difficulty in the love lives of others during this holiday season due to this pressure to make everything perfect for the big day. Later on in the run of The Office, Ryan is horrified when he realizes that he started a relationship with Kelley the day before Valentine’s day. If he had just waited, he wouldn’t have had the pressure to come up with the perfect gift and experience. Wendy Wildcat, one of the staff writers here at the Paw Print, explains in her most recent Valentine’s day article that “Valentine’s Day is the stupidest holiday ever to exist…Instead of love, there’s only pain.”
It’s hard to say why this happens to so many couples since you can never really tell what’s going on in their heads. Sometimes people mentally breakup with people months ahead of the holidays and just decide to rip-off the bandaid before you have to spend those celebrations with them. But hey, who are we to judge? At least there’s always clearance on candy the day after, so if you’re dealing with a heart wrenching breakup, just go buy yourself something nice!
