“Alone again on Valentine’s day lol nbd hate boiz,” reads a Facebook post on your newsfeed every year. You scroll past and see a photo of a girl and a bouquet of pink roses captioned “Love him more each day <3.”
Some people love Valentine’s Day. They like the sentiment of the holiday and feel that it is important in our society for there to be a day where we just celebrate love for its intrinsic value.
Others see these idealists as materialistic peasants who extol heart-shaped chocolates and mediocre romantic comedies (anything other than When Harry Met Sally and Woody Allen films, let’s be real) and they don’t care about Valentine’s Day.
They really don’t. For sure. And they want you to know that they don’t care because they really don’t care.
Whether you’re single or alone, we all face an onslaught of sentimentality and oversharing each Feb. 14. Whether the thoughts on Valentine’s Day are positive or negative, there’s something particularly cringe-worthy about the social media content posted on this day. A new partnership between ChristianMingle.com and the creator of the Twitter account @sosadtoday may have given us a solution: VDay.
VDay is a new social media platform meant to keep your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter feeds totally free of the gross oversharing that goes on every Valentine’s Day. Instead of posting your whiny, self-pitying reflection about “being single” on Facebook, or posting a picture of your candlelit dinner with your loving boyfriend on Instagram, you just put these things on your VDay profile.
Sophomore Dilara Silver was particularly thrilled to use VDay this Feb. 14. She had a lot of thoughts about Valentine’s Day that she wanted—no, needed—to share.
“Ohmygod can you just, like, please kill me, it’s, like, actually just a Hallmark holiday meant to exploit American consumerism,” Silver’s first VDay post reads. “Did you see 500 Days of Summer? Joseph Gordon-Levitt talked about it in that. He was like, ‘Oh it’s just to sell these cards that don’t mean anything that you didn’t even write.’ It was good. Like, really compelling. He’s cute.”
“I used to watch Love Actually and eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ‘Phish Food,’” Silver said. “Every Valentine’s Day for six years. But then I saw 500 Days of Summer and I started thinking about love differently. And then I read Marx’s Wage Labor and Capital and I realized that Valentine’s Day is just a part of the ideological superstructure that supports the oppressive system of capitalism and commodification of the self.”
Silver’s friend and roommate, sophomore Dana Donnelly, also liked using VDay. She posted 34 pictures of her with her boyfriend, sophomore Ethan Boulay, from 10 a.m. Feb. 14 to 2 a.m. Feb. 15. One photo was captioned, “Me and bae!” Another was captioned, “I love you so much I can’t even deal <3.” Donnelly is psyched that she can post anything she wants about Valentine’s Day without losing any Instagram followers.
“I’m really glad that I can post these pictures of me and Ethan and not screw up my Instagram grid,” Donnelly said. She also liked that her Twitter feed was completely clear of Valentine’s Day posts so she could keep up to date on world news.
“I follow the Al Jazeera Twitter account like really closely,” she said. “So I was happy that this app could filter my content and allow me to stay informed.”
Right now, VDay is only available as an iPhone app. Developers have a Kickstarter page to increase their service space and make the app available for Android.
