YAHOO POLL: Is Valentine's Day only for lovers?
Valentine's Day is often seen as a marketing ploy. An annual ruse to get couples to spend money on over-priced flowers or gifts and expensive meals. There's pressure to plan extravagant date-nights so you can post about it on social media the next day. It doesn't seem like a very healthy habit.
And so this Valentine's Day and the ones after that, why not try your hand at something more healthier? No, not healthier food options. But expanding your thinking of Valentine's Day beyond one-on-one relationships. Try reflecting on 'love' for family, friends, your community and even the world!
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Adopting a healthier mindset about Valentine's Day will lead to a more stress-free and wallet-friendly start to the year. And hopefully it'll also help you avoid all the Valentine's Day-related scams that are out there.
So, we want to know: Is Valentine's Day only for lovers?
Have your say and take the poll.
Related:
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Failure to participate in the birthday pile-on will be noted not just by Tash but by everyone else in the group. Dutifully, you tap out a message and head for the bathroom to brush your teeth. Friends coming together to wish another friend happy birthday. Harmless enough, right? Wrong. If you ask me, the person who sends that initial message is committing an egregious act of friendship hit-and-run. Think about it. DM a friend on their birthday and chances are you'll have to send at least one follow-up text when they inevitably ask how you are and what you've been up to. Share your well wishes in the group chat, however, and you sidestep the time-consuming business of engaging in further conversation — a particularly effective strategy if the friend in question is second-tier rather than BFF. Perhaps this is the cynic in me talking but I suspect, too, that the motivating factor for sharing birthday greetings in the group chat is less a desire to make your loved one feel special on their special day and more a compulsion to show off. There is a performative function to dropping a 'Happy Birthday!' text in a space where it can be seen by people other than the intended recipient. The fact that it unleashes, almost invariably, a flood of messages from other members of the group is confirmation for the original texter that they are somehow superior. That they have won the friendship race. (I'm not extrapolating here; check out these posts where proponents of such heinous behavior confess to relishing this very feeling.) It's the group chat equivalent of the juvenile mentality that was common in the early days of YouTube, when people — probably men, let's be honest — would scramble to be the first to comment on a clip, posting simply and quite pointlessly, 'first'. And what about the poor individual on the receiving end of this barrage of texts? Imagine waking up on your birthday, reaching for your phone and opening the group chat to find a stream of greetings all sent within minutes of each other. To my mind these aren't 'Happy Birthday!' messages. These are 'Gina's wished you Happy Birthday so now I'm wishing you Happy Birthday!' messages. Or 'Oh shit I forgot it was your birthday, good job Ellie reminded me. Happy Birthday!' messages. The overarching sentiment is not warm and heartfelt but guilt-stricken and insincere. For she's a jolly good fellow? Don't make me laugh. If you are lucky enough — or, depending on your perspective, unfortunate enough — to be part of a family group chat, there is a fun twist on this trend which involves adults who really should know better filming their kids singing 'Happy Birthday' to nanna or grandad or whoever and dropping the video in the chat. We know what you're doing, guys. Send the video directly to the recipient and pass up the opportunity to have the entire family coo over your little one's adorable lisp and idiosyncratic dance moves? Please. The trouble with this is that it creates a kind of one-upmanship, with each subsequent birthday kicking off a procession of pageant-like home movies in which grown-up siblings vie to outdo one another via the medium of their children's cuteness. I have a kid myself so I understand the drive to show them off but in doing so the person whose birthday it is — the reason for all this silliness, remember — gets forgotten altogether.
