Single people may actually be better off on Valentine’s Day anyway, write the philosopher Neil McArthur and the economist Marina Adshade. The compulsion to give gifts creates a version of what game theorists call a prisoner’s dilemma, they contend, which inevitably leaves lovers feeling either slighted or inefficiently satisfied: “If you are single on Valentine’s Day, you are only missing out on the opportunity to participate in an exercise that makes everyone involved worse off than they would have been had the holiday not existed at all.”

‘A cauldron of unmet expectations’

Valentine’s Day perpetuates a tyrannical fantasy of what love should look like, according to Deborah Carr, a professor of sociology at Boston University. “The whole holiday conspires to make people feel that they’re not living up to this standard of lovely romance,” she told The Washington Post in 2015. Even then, social media was already making matters worse by expanding public practices of self-performance and concealment: “No one puts up an ugly picture of themselves, or the bad gift they got from CVS.”

The social pressure the holiday exerts can be particularly irksome for queer people, writes Yas Necati. “It pushes society’s ideal of what our relationships ‘should’ look like — heterosexual, monogamous, sexual, romantic,” they write. “If you don’t have this — whether that’s because you don’t want to or you just don’t — you are considered to be failing in the eyes of a society that pushes us all, inevitably, towards the nuclear family ideal.”

[Related: “I’m Polyamorous and Valentine’s Day Is … Complicated”]

But you can always accept that this holiday isn’t for you, Vanessa Rasanen has argued in The Federalist. “If you don’t need a special day to celebrate your marriage or your relationship — or you don’t have any special someone to celebrate with — no one is forcing you,” she writes. “This holiday is for the people with busy lives, who don’t mind chocolate coming in a heart-shaped box once in a while, who like having one day marked on their hectic calendars to take a bit more time to celebrate love and relationship and life together.”