I am anti-Valentine’s day. Yes, I could argue that Valentine’s day is a capitalistic scheme that bastardizes romantic love, one of the only things we cannot place a monetary value on in this world. Yes, I could argue that a holiday that romanticises performative rituals of chocolates and flowers takes away from celebrating healthier aspects of romantic relationships. Yes, I could argue that self-love is neglected and under-celebrated in comparison to romantic relationships. But I would only be able to argue those things if I did not have a more foundational issue, which all those perspectives take for granted; one that lies with the problematic idea of what romance is, fundamentally.

I find Valentine’s day problematic because it is a celebration of normative romance and sexuality. I’m no cynic. I love love. I am all for it, actually. But my idea of love is very likely to be different from yours.

From a very young age, we have been force-fed a particular narrative: meet the perfect person, fall passionately in love, establish a strong connection with them, be faithful, get married, start a family, and grow old together. We learn about what we want to have, internalising tropes by reading about Prince Charmings and The Girl Next Door, or by seeing Rihanna and ASAP Rocky’s couple photos on Instagram. We learn about what we want to avoid by watching people closest to us getting into toxic relationships, or learning against our will about whatever Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly have going on. But either way, we fall into imitating the social and cultural paradigms surrounding love. 

I notice that the harmful aspects of normative sexuality are an oversight to even the most self-reflective people, my past self included. Our internalised ideas about our most personal relationships tend to escape the rigorous critical thinking we might apply to other topics. Normative romance and sexuality are so ingrained in our culture, media, and social ideas that we often take them for granted.

Another thing that contributes to us not questioning normative sexuality is the fact that normative sexuality, like other dominant cultural powers (ie: whiteness), expands and contracts to whatever will keep it in power and profit. For example, the way Valentine’s Day-themed ad campaigns will now include gay couples mixed in with straight couples to show diversity and appeal to a wider audience. Even those marginalised in society are included and recruited into the pyramid scheme of romance. 

While normative romance is able to include anyone in its conscription, it also places harmful limitations on its participants. One such limitation is mononormativity. 

In the All My Relations podcast episode “Decolonizing Sex,” Dr. Kim Tallbear defines mononormativity, or compulsory monogamy, as the expectation that long-term monogamy is the normative standard to which we aspire. Mononormativity is founded on the values of capitalism and colonialism. Marriage as an institution historically tied women and children economically to men, awarding the men of the household additional land for their wives and children. Essentially, mononormativity culture was legislatively promoted through marriage as a way of accumulating wealth while policing and owning women’s bodies. 

Dr. Kim Tallbear, drawing from Indigenous ontologies of good relations, illustrated the colonial implications of compulsory monogamy. She connects the same principles of ownership from the colonial idea of private property to principles of ownership over your partner in monogamous relationship dynamics.

So what would be the solution to mononormativity? The simple answer is popularizing non-monogamy or other unconventional relationship dynamics. But the true goals are to deconstruct the pedestalling of monogamy as the only correct option, destigmatize other relationship models, and focus on relationships where we do not own or police each other’s bodies and behaviour. 

“I think that part of what a culture of domination has done is raise that romantic relationship up as the single most important bond, when of course the single most important bond is that of community” – Bell Hooks

Relationship anarchy is an approach to intimate relationships that applies anarchist principles like autonomy, anti-hierarchy, and community interdependence. You can form unconventional relationship dynamics where you do anything you want and call it anything you want, so long as everyone involved is consenting and communicating. 

Relationship anarchy is, then, a useful approach to challenging compulsory monogamy, but also relationship hierarchies. 

Relationship hierarchy is the idea that your relationships have an order of importance in your life, with your romantic relationship holding more value and weight over other ones. Have you ever witnessed a friend get completely consumed by their romantic relationship and then stop spending time with anyone else aside from their partner? That is an example of a relationship hierarchy placing the romantic relationship as paramount over the others. 

A related concept is what Rice University philosopher Elizabeth Brake calls amatonormativity: the social expectation that a central, exclusive, romantic relationship is normal for humans. Amatonormativity has a twin concept in compulsory sexuality. 

Author of “Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex” Angela Chen defines compulsory sexuality as a set of assumptions and behaviours that support the idea that “every normal person is sexual, that not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong, and that people who don’t care about sexuality are missing out on an utterly necessary experience.”

Do you ever notice how virtually every song on the radio is about either love, sex, or both? Amatonormativity and compulsory sexuality furiously manifest themselves in the media we consume, with harmful effects on our identity, language, and institutions. The way we conceive sexuality and romantic relationships is political. 

For example, sexual liberation in feminism has come to mean that having a super exciting and pleasurable sex life is empowering. And yet, as Angela Chen puts it, “because sexual variation exists, there is no universal vision of liberated sexuality.” Instead, true sexual liberation is the freedom of choice with one’s own sexuality.

Both amatonormativity and compulsory sexuality work in tandem with mononormativity to create a broader idea of what is normative romance and sexuality. Heteronormativity is also included in this construction of normative love. 

Heteronormativity, coined by Michael Warner, refers to how both our legal institutions and sociocultural institutions are entrenched with heterosexuality as an ideal and devalue any deviation from this norm. This originates from colonial binary ideas about gender and sexuality that shape how we conceptualise romantic social scripts. It also manifests in the words we use for topics like parenthood, i.e. the nuclear family, marriage, and other relational language.

All of those above-defined terms play into how we culturally conceptualise love, romance, sexuality, and consequently what we celebrate on Valentine’s day. 

Rethinking Romance and How We Love

“The idea of romantic love is one ‘of the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.’” – Toni Morrison, in The Bluest Eye

Ask yourself for a second, “what is romance?” Images of heart-shaped chocolates or a surprise bouquet of flowers might pop into mind. Or maybe you have your own ideas of intimacy and closeness. 

Whatever the case, the idea of romance is much more fragile than we might initially believe. It is easy to deconstruct its defining features by asking how romantic relationships differentiate from other non-romantic ones. 

Yes, you might not kiss or have sex with your friends, but you might in a Friends-With-Benefits dynamic. Yes, you may not share your most intimate secrets with your one-night-stand lover, but you might with your closest friends. You can surprise your friends with flowers, you can take yourself out on dates. All of these “defining” features are not unique and exclusive to a romantic relationship. 

So the question stands, what is it about a romantic relationship that makes it so special? Spoiler alert: nothing in particular. Romantic love is a social construct, reinforced by normative culture.

As I touched on above, a lot of the ideas surrounding romantic love and sexuality celebrate colonial, capitalist values. These cultural norms go hand in hand with other systems of oppression, like white supremacy, ableism, gender-based violence, or faith-based discrimination. The narrative of normative love is a political tool that decides what is considered transgressive and who is transgressing.

This is key because beliefs surrounding normative love can be dangerous or even deadly. One instance of this in play is how amatonormativity and compulsory sexuality culture make it dangerous for women to turn down advances from men from fear of being attacked or murdered. 

Dismantling normative ideas surrounding love can help dismantle conditioned and commonly held beliefs about the either repressive or hypersexual sexuality of people with disabilities, BIPOC folk, and queer people. They can dismantle similar ideas that we might have internalised about the relational capacities of oppressed groups as well. 

Calling into question what we assume to be true about our personal relationships is an easy but essential way to oppose harmful social forces. We need to reflect on what values we are upholding when we sigh dreamily after reading a 43 chapter slow-burn slash fanfiction of our favourite anime ship. 

Yeah. If that last example was a bit too specific, please take that as a sign that I am just as indoctrinated into amatonormativity as everyone else. But I am also committed to unlearning these cultural norms and intentionally questioning my social conditioning. 

I love love. But accepting normative love just because it was handed to us is unacceptable. As psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm wrote, “Love [is] a choice. Love [is] something within our control.” We have the power to transform what we understand love to be.