Valentine’s Day is known as a day of love. Media images show it as a day to express love, usually with material items like jewelry, flowers, food, things a woman would love. Men evidently don’t need to be gifted with anything until Christmas.

The reality of Valentine’s Day is that it’s a sham.

The history of Valentine’s Day is not exact. It has been suggested that the Catholic Church may have hijacked what was originally a Pagan festival and turned it into a St. Valentine feast day.

According to History.com, Valentine’s Day was celebrated as early as the Middle Ages, then in the 1400s written notes followed by handmade Valentines in the 1700s and printed cards in the 1900s.

Now it’s blown up. BusinessInsider.com reports that the average American is expected to spend $116.21 on their sweeties this year and Hallmark reported 141 million cards are exchanged worldwide. That’s a lot of love.

There seems to be a lot of pressure associated with Valentine’s Day.

BusinessInsider.com published a list of “20 Crazy Facts About Customer Spending And Valentine’s Day” including statistics on the number of engagements, the sales of: jewelry, condoms, flowers, cards and candy and the first “fact” of the list is the percentage of women who would break up with their boyfriends who did not give a gift for Valentine’s.

Perhaps, not surprising, Valentine’s Day has been marred by violence through the years. The Valentine’s Day Massacre was a gang war between Al Capone and George “Bugs” Moran. “The 7 Most Brutal Valentine’s Day Murders” on Ranker.com lists four instances of men killing their wives, one wife murdered her husband, a young man murdered his girlfriend and in the seventh case both boyfriend and girlfriend were found dead, apparently murdered by a third party. A quick Google search pulled up many news stories about Valentine’s Day being designated for domestic violence awareness.

Love has been the subject of countless poems, songs, visual art pieces, plays, movies, books, etc. The Beatles sang, “All you need is love” but If love is all we need, then why do we need a holiday for it? In this society, holidays are pimped out by the media to inspire consumers to spend money in order to show their significant other how they feel.

What if there was no Valentine’s Day? How else would people express the basic emotion of love? Humans must have been able to before the middle ages, because the human race didn’t phase out.

If money and materials things are taken out of Valentine’s Day, chances are people can find more sincere ways to express love without instances of blood shed and loss of lives.