What Are People’s Perceptions of Valentine’s Day?

Historically, Valentine’s Day was an annual feast celebrated on February 14th that was associated with love and romance. While the exact origins of this holiday are controversial and disputed, Valentine’s Day retains a lot of those historical connotations to this day. Of course, while some folks outright reject the holiday and choose not to participate, the celebration of Valentine’s Day remains common.

But what features of this holiday are most important to people in the modern world? Is it about love? Sex? Flowers? Chocolate? Something else? In this post, we’re going to dive into the things people most commonly associate with Valentine’s Day.

Perceptions of Valentine’s Day

Sansone and colleagues (2021) conducted an analysis of data from nearly 900,000 posts on Twitter/X leading up to Valentine’s Day to see what people were talking about and what features were most important to people’s perceptions of the holiday. The researchers used an algorithm to comb through hundreds of thousands of posts containing the word “Valentine” to determine what features people think the holiday is all about.

Unsurprisingly, the most common word across all these posts was “love,” with almost 30,000 tweets mentioning it. Other related words like “special,” “romantic,” and “mine” also reflect the holiday’s love-based, romantic themes. However, the researchers uncovered some additional common perceptions of Valentine’s Day through their analysis. The image below shows the most common words in Valentine’s Day tweets.

(Image from Sansone et al., 2021)

Gift-Giving and Valentine’s Day

A large proportion of the posts included material elements of Valentine’s Day—such as “gift,” “chocolate,” “card,” and “flowers.” These items are commonly exchanged on Valentine’s Day, which may trace back to the holiday’s origins in 18th-century Britain, where gifting cards was a popular tradition. The researchers suggested that this emphasis on gift-giving could be motivated by several factors, including cultural expectations or the desire to act as an aphrodisiac and set the mood for a romantic evening. Regardless of their motivations, it seems that people still believe that gift-giving is an important component of the holiday.

Perceptions of Sex and Intimacy on Valentine’s Day

While the word “sex” was not as high on the list as you may have expected, it still seems that intimacy and sex are important on Valentine’s Day. When the researchers looked only at words related to sex, they found that the most common words were “sexy,” “love,” followed again by gift-related items. Porn, lingerie, and slang terms for women’s bodies were also prevalent in the sex-related posts. Based on these findings, it definitely seems that there is an erotic component to Valentine’s Day for many folks.

Although this study suggests that traditional gift-giving is a big part of how people celebrate this holiday, keep in mind that there are plenty of other avenues for gift-giving that can make your partner feel special without involving any financial strain—such as giving your partner a massage. Although these more experiential gifts were not really mentioned in the study, doing something along these lines is an easy way to combine both the gift-giving and intimacy aspects of the holiday.

While it’s interesting to see the bigger picture of what people consider important on this special day, it’s always worthwhile to communicate with your partner about their needs and expectations to make them feel valued. This communication is essential because people have varying expectations—some may not be interested in the holiday at all, others may expect or hope for a grand romantic gesture, while others just want to keep it simple. There isn’t really a right or wrong way to do Valentine’s Day–just do it on your own terms!

References:

Sansone, A., Cignarelli, A., Mollaioli, D., Ciocca, G., Limoncin, E., Romanelli, F., Balercia, G., & Jannini, E. A. (2021). The social aspects of sexual health: A Twitter-based analysis of Valentine’s Day perception. Sexes, 2(1), 50–59. https://doi.org/10.3390/sexes2010004

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 Image Credits: Priscilla Du Preez via Unsplash