Being a Valentine's Day non-enthusiast by rule, I surprised myself today by wearing a pink dress and entering a shopping mall to watch the movie Valentine's Day with my friends (all Valentine's Day groupies). The movie — which I likened to Love Actually and was keen to see — turned to out to be a confirmation that Valentine's Day is indeed a shallow, commercialized, and manipulative celebration of everything but love (a viewpoint that, until now, I have been reluctant to agree with).

For one, all the lead actresses in the movie were abnormally skinny and all the men (even the geeky ones) were clean shaven, slim, and somewhat defined. In fact, the entire cast seemed to be chosen according to how good they looked naked — the men barely kept their shirts on and the women strutted around in tiny skirts or their men's oversized shirts. Additionally, the quality of acting was equivalent to the quality of materials used in low-cost housing. With the movie having an equally poor plot (or rather, too many poor plots), I wished that I had rather spent my Sunday morning helping assemble ill-suited materials to build low-cost houses for those who are poverty stricken. I would have seen more love doing the latter than I did during the entire 125 minutes of Valentine's Day.

The movie asserted the view that love is indeed shallow. In one "loving" relationship, Taylor Swift plays a ditzy, conceited school girl going out with Taylor Lautner because he was hot and athletic and, wait for it, he stayed with her and "loved" her regardless. Watching her act made me feel as if someone was massaging my eyes with sandpaper and left me with that I-know-why-Lautner-broke-up-with-Swift-in-reality feeling. Even more experienced actresses like Jennifer Garner failed to evoke any emotions in the viewer due to the haphazard plot sequence, ill-developed characters, and the lack of true love. Garner's character, who initially asserts that she had found "the one," simply dismisses the fact that this aforementioned "one" was in fact married with kids and simply moves on to loving her best friend. In another love story, child star Bryce Robinson spends the entire day waiting for his flowers to be delivered so that he may pass it on to his love. In a cheap twist, it turns out that the boy has a crush on his teacher. This problem is solved in five minutes after a one-on-one heart-to-heart in which the teacher offers him a more suitable recipient and Robinson moves on to deliver his long awaited bouquet to his same-aged best friend.  In this way, former loves were continually dismissed within seconds and replaced with better options which ultimately reinforced everything that love is not. Moreover, all love stories failed to contain even a gram of true romance: lines were cheap, characters were easy, and objects of affection could simply be purchased. Also, nobody truly cries when they have their hearts torn to pieces (in my own relationships, knowing that the guy I loved was a jerk never stopped me from drowning my room in tears). The only poignant line in the movie was delivered by Shirley MacLaine (the old wise one), who stated that when you love someone, you love them for their entirety and not only for the good bits. Sadly, this line fell into a deep haystack, lost in our inability to engage with any of the characters (there were just so many!) and their inability to truly love.

The saddest part of the whole movie was that it accurately represented the reality of most Valentine's Day followers (and even haters, perhaps). In my own experience, the first Valentine's Day that I remember was when I was 11. I was the lonely girl who had chosen to follow the steps of Mr. Bean and send myself a Valentine's Day card. I remember hating myself because I thought that only the pretty and popular ones deserved to be pampered on Valentine's Day. Having then attended an all girls high school, Valentine's Day always began with the delivering of roses to and from schools of the opposite sex and always ended with me watching the 'special' girls glowing behind their bunches of roses (allegedly, the amount of roses that you received on Valentine's Day equated to how popular you would be perceived by your peers). By the time that I had reached campus, I had grown into a Valentine's Day hater, spreading the words "love sucks" to all who cared to listen while secretly wishing that someone among the six billion would be spending the day thinking about only me.

Today, however, after watching Valentine's Day, I feel a sense of joy knowing that, in 23 years, I had not once received a Valentine's Day gift nor spent the day celebrating love. I'd like to think that love is more than everything that Valentine's Day represents and that romance still lives within the fast-paced and technological confines of contemporary society. Maybe I am just another dreamer who has read one too many Nicholas Sparks novels…I'd rather dream than settle.

Tharuna Devchand