There was a time when the only institutions that used to celebrate (read: hitched a ride on) Valentine’s Day were restaurants. They would offer you a special discounted meal for finding the love of your life – or the love of the week. Now even Karol Bagh’s Vipin Sales has jumped on to the love boat, offering a 30% ‘Valentine’s discount’ on an air fryer or, if you really want to clean up your act, a washing machine.
In today’s day and age, people like me are left channeling Haddaway – millennials, he’s a Trinidadian-German singer with a one-hit wonder in the early 1990s – and asking, ‘What is love? (Baby don’t hurt me)’. Earlier, come Valentine’s Day, we’d have a newly released romcom with the top stars. Now, you get a 4-part series on the genius of Aditya Chopra instead.
You can forget about a Notting Hill, or a Love Actually. In the Age of Woke, not only is every romcom a socio-cultural commentary in disguise, but actors no longer kiss. So, that one kiss you saw in the new romcom, You People, was actually a CGI kiss. In Netflix’s big 2022 romance film, Falling for Christmas, Lindsay Lohan’s kiss with her co-star Chord Overstreet was filmed with a ‘stunt double’ — because Lohan’s contract said that she would not kiss on camera. Even the world of make-believe can’t be believed in any more.
Swinging from one extreme of fixity to the other, people now don’t have ‘steady’ boyfriends or girlfriends – sorry, I mean ‘partners’. Youngsters, or even oldies, like me don’t meet people at a friend’s place or at a party. They ‘meet’ people on Raya, Cinder, Binder, Grindr, Hinge, Binge, Hurl.
They diss arranged marriages – because they’re ‘regressive’ and ‘commodify women’. But the progressive, woke and peri-outraged are fine with choosing people for ‘long-term relationships’ off dating apps by looking at five well-curated pictures and a three-sentence description that is usually as catchy as ‘Amit: 38, Love sunsets and trekking – and aloo burgers. Hookups only, but also looking for love.’
I did ask someone a generation younger what her boyfriend had given her on V-Day, while sharing anecdotes of how our loves (even the most fleeting ones) used to write poems for us, even while breaking up. She told me that nowadays people usually send each other quotes from poems. A sample? ‘If the hurt comes, so will the happiness.’ I could almost feel Shelley and Wordsworth, the original English Romantics, whirling like Industrial Revolution turbines in their graves. Unsurprising, given that most people now think a billet-doux is a venereal disease you can catch around Valentine’s Day. People are so fed up with not finding the perfect one, they’ve turned to self-love – a concept purer than what it sounds like. People are marrying themselves, taking themselves out on dates, having Galentine’s celebrations, professing that the greatest relationship they have is with themselves, and even divorcing themselves. Which is all very fine. But it’s really spending quality time by yourself given a fancy name.
I get it that we can no longer walk barefoot in the park – unless you want to become a statistic But maybe, the olden days of dates with people you actually knew, to watch films where people actually kissed and which weren’t making some overt cultural point, and the exchange of poetry that actually had some sense of meter may not have been such a bad thing. Or maybe it’s time to make way for poems written by ChatGPT and romance-neutral romcoms. Bill Clinton calling Hillary his ‘forever Valentine’ on Twitter may well sum up the state of true love and romance in 2023.
