Love and hate are two sides of the same coin, or so goes the popular adage. It is thus not surprising that love was not the only emotion in the air this past week — ‘Valentine’s Week’, in the words of wolfish marketers. The pungent scents of anger, resentment, and even animosity towards lovebirds could be discerned along with the aroma of roses and chocolates. The sight and smells of love are beginning to elicit counter-mobilisations among the loveless and the lonely around the world, filling the ranks that believe in the sanctity of an Anti-Valentine’s Day.
Anti-Valentine's Day, just like its lovey-dovey cousin, is coded with its own rituals. These can include a visit to ‘rage rooms’ where people pay to break, crush and wreak havoc on things or taking boxing lessons with a photograph of the object of one’s hate — or, in other words, love — pinned onto the sandbag. San Antonio Zoo’s Cry Me a Cockroach fundraiser even allows people to name a roach or a rodent after their former lovers and feed it to the animals at the zoo; the programme has earned $235,000 to date. If Cupid and Aphrodite are the patron deities of V-Day, Hoar, the Greek god of retribution, evidently reigns supreme for the Anti-Valentiners.
But the lovesick are not to be loathed. In fact, it can be argued that this growing constituency is serving as an important crucible to examine social transformations that lie at the heart of the matter. For instance, a study by the Pew Research Center found that loneliness — described by the World Health Organisation as a pressing health concern — the outcome of isolationism, crumbling familial structures, and economic hardship, is breeding a sense of rancour at those lucky enough to have found company. Then, in India, vigilante hordes — right-wing groups that take it upon themselves to police couples in the name of protecting indigenous culture — are another, more rabid, manifestation of those sickened by amour. Interestingly, the commodification of love seems to be swelling the ranks of the AVD brigade. A marketing study by students from Oxford University found that excessive demands of flowers, chocolates, cards and, not least of all, public posts on social media — markers of the market’s encroachment on the heart — are turning people away from love.
The Anti-Valentiners, though, are not exactly immune from the predations of the market forces that continue to infiltrate the heart and, more tellingly, the purse. Capitalism’s ingenuity lies in its ability to shape the codes of AVD conduct as well — be it the encryption of measures to express anger at one’s ex or, as in Dublin, Ireland, where AVD supporters were encouraged to visit a swanky two-floor retail space and indulge in consumeristic hedonism. At the end of the day, those in and out of love, it appears, are mere putty in the hands of commerce.