Valentine’s Day has many toxic characteristics; the most well-known one is the confusion of sex and love. When I asked a student at Stockton University, who wants to remain anonymous, about what is the first thing that enters her mind when talking about Valentine’s Day, he said “the toxic characteristic of sex for this holiday.” When you think about it, he is so close to the truth. Sex is given an underlying meaning on Valentine’s Day that has the worst connotation to it.
Sex is all around us. Everywhere you go there it is. From billboards, while driving and music on the radio, to television and movie plots where sharing bodies, is as casual a notion as sharing a taxi, to the extremely well defined and over-exposed boobs and butts passing as you’re sitting at red lights or on social media, there is truly no avoiding messages of sex. We have always lived in a society that shoves sex down our throats since we were old enough to understand what it is. Adding the hypo-romantic Valentine’s Day to the mix is truly showing signs of disaster. Adding this horrid and overrated holiday to the mix starts the anxiety-inducing, self-conscious spiral that many have.
The advertisements that are all over social media and television on this day makes everything worse. They constantly are telling you that you are nothing if nobody wants you, and that you are everything if they all do. Either you are sexually desirable or you are desperate in the eyes of culture and society. Because society has done a bang-up job making sex synonymous with love, Valentine’s Day presents many opportunities for foolery. All over America, people will overspend, surrender their bodies, tolerate mistreatment, neglect their own needs just to have a Valentine. And too many find out far too late, often as soon as the wee hours of the morning of February 15th, that love had nothing to do with it and it was just a hookup.
But, with toxic sex characteristics comes toxic relationships. Some of the telling signs of a toxic relationship are it feels bad most of the time, you avoid saying what you needed want, no effort is put into the relationship by either party, and “no” becomes a dirty word. When talking to a student at St. John’s who wanted to remain anonymous about toxic relationships. “It’s really hard to tell when you’re in a toxic situation and it’s hard to get yourself out of one, especially when you’re in a new relationship or with people that you don’t know very well,” she stated. This student shared that she spent the majority of her first semester dealing with the aftermath of a toxic situation and explained how hard it was to cope with what had happened and how much of an impact it had not only on her classes but her emotional brain as well. “It was really hard because I never knew where I would see him, and it would bring back all of the memories,” she said. She stated she stopped eating at the dining halls to avoid conflict and had trouble going to some of her classes when she knew he would be in the same building at that time.
For anyone reading this article who feels the same way as the student and needs help please contact the following:
Domestic Violence hotline: 1-800-799-7233.