Time to look past superficiality of holidays
Self-serving Valentine’s Day candy does not replace true love, healthy relationship

It’s two days after Valentine’s Day and most of you, coming down off the temporary high you got from the roses, whether they were real or fake, or the candy you got, have realized that your relationship still sucks.
And if by chance your relationship is good, it’s not because of the gifts you received two days ago or because your significant other faithfully fulfills his or her capitalist moral obligation to spend a few bucks on every recognized holiday.

It all goes back to the cliché, “money can’t buy love.” And no matter how many times we hear it, we still fail to let it really sink in.

Although there’s nothing wrong with expressing your love or concern for someone through giving, I find it disturbing that too many people think that either giving is limited to what money can buy or that, when we do give, it has to be when society designates for us to.

The latter I find more disturbing for two reasons.

First, the whole idea that, for the most part, we only give to the poor on Christmas and Thanksgiving and then we walk away thinking we deserve the Nobel Peace Prize is so superficial. It’s as if either we are so self-centered that we think those who are poverty stricken only need food, water, clothes and shelter twice a year, or we are so egotistical that we think we don’t owe them anything so they should be appreciative of anything we do give them. And if that’s the way you feel, you might as well not give at all.

To me, it’s that kind of sickly self-serving thinking that leads to millions of deaths from starvation and disease every year.

Secondly, for some reason we think that having a healthy relationship, whether it be between spouses or mates or between children and parents, means that we fulfill all the statuesque of society. It’s like unspoken dogma. Every Christmas you spoil your children with gifts (that they’ll hate and throw in the closet after three weeks) until you go into debt. Every Valentine’s Day, depending on the length of your relationship, you come up with something a little more expensive than the last. When your son gets his license, if you have enough money, you get him a sports car (that he’ll wreck at least three times). On Easter, if you’re religious, you buy some new suit or dress, etc.

Maybe I exaggerated a little bit here and there but hopefully, you get the point I’m trying to make. We live in a materialistic society that compels us to either focus on our own self-gratification or to focus more on impressing those outside our relationships than really developing the relationships themselves.

So basically what I’m saying is forget about what someone did or didn’t get you and forget about yourself and your own selfish desires sometimes. You’ll learn to enjoy life a lot more.

John Sargent is a freshmen computer science major from Fort Worth.
He can be reached at (j.w.sargent@student.tcu.edu).

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