What Valentine’s Day Taught Me About My Worth
This may not be the most romantic way to enter this week, but here it goes…
February exposes the gap between what we’re sold and what we actually feel. The light is finally returning—slowly. Nature isn’t blooming yet; it’s only preparing. Animals aren’t performing intimacy; they’re conserving energy. And humans? We’re being asked to celebrate love at full volume, on blast, while many of us are still thawing out.
This is why February can feel uncomfortable—not because love is absent, but because illusion cracks under low light.
What if the discomfort so many people feel this time of year isn’t loneliness at all? What if it’s resistance—to being marketed to, measured, or compared? What if your system already knows that love isn’t meant to be purchased, performed, or proven… and that’s why something feels off?
Where This Became Real for Me
As a child, this holiday filled me with anxiety.
Every year in school, there was the same ritual — a decorated box on your desk, a slit cut into the top, and the unspoken tally that followed. Who received the most. Who was chosen. Who was remembered. And who wasn’t. I remember watching my box, year after year, stay mostly empty.
In those moments, my worth felt measurable. Love felt conditional. And the silence of that box felt loud enough to confirm a story no child should ever have to carry — that something was wrong with me, that I was unlovable, that I had somehow failed.
That experience, repeated in small and subtle ways throughout childhood, was crippling. It taught me early how quickly love can become transactional. How easily belonging can be reduced to a count, a gesture, a public display.
And it also did something else.
Over time, those moments forged a kind of grit — a refusal to let love remain external. A necessary turning inward. I had to learn how to meet myself where no one else was showing up. And in doing so, I learned to love myself more fiercely, more honestly, and more enduringly than anything Valentine’s Day could offer.
That’s why this holiday has always felt a bit phony to me — not because love isn’t real, but because performative love is.
If affection, commitment, presence, and honor aren’t lived the rest of the year, a single day doesn’t redeem their absence. Love doesn’t arrive on a calendar. It reveals itself in consistency. In repair. And in how we show up when no one is watching.
Maybe that’s why this time of year still stirs something for so many of us — not because we lack love, but because some part of us remembers when our worth was measured in a moment that never told the whole truth.
When Love Becomes a Product
We are not suffering from a lack of love. We are suffering from a surplus of illusion.
Somewhere along the way, love was polished, packaged, and priced — turned into something to prove rather than something to practice. Romance became spectacle. Intimacy became performance. Worth became something demonstrated through gestures, timelines, and visibility.
But real love doesn’t need an audience. It needs presence. Repair. Honesty. Endurance. What feels uncomfortable this time of year isn’t loneliness. It’s the pressure to perform an emotion that was never meant to be purchased.
Love was never meant to be transactional. And worth was never meant to be seasonal.
When We Dim to Belong
This week, many people contract without realizing it. We scroll. We compare. We measure who is loved “out loud” and who is loved quietly—or not at all. We lower expectations. We brace ourselves. We try to look loved instead of feel loved.
The danger isn’t being single or partnered. The danger is believing love must look a certain way to be real.
When love becomes something to earn, buy, or prove, we abandon our own center. We perform instead of embody. We seek validation instead of cultivate connection—first with ourselves, then with others. And slowly, we dim to belong.
A Quiet Reflection
Instead of asking Why dont I have a Valentine? Try asking:
Where have I outsourced my sense of being loved?
What version of love did I learn to chase instead of cultivate?
Am I responding to absence — or to expectation?
What does love feel like when no one is watching?
Let the answers rise slowly. No fixing required.
Reclaiming Your Light
February is not a dead month. It is a preparatory one. Beneath the surface, roots strengthen. Systems wake. Light returns — not dramatically, but deliberately. If this week asks you to shrink because you don’t fit a marketed version of love, your work is to do the opposite.
Stay luminous. Choose nourishment over numbing. Choose embodiment over performance. Choose presence over proof.
You do not need a Valentine to be visible to life.
Love is not a product you receive. It is a frequency you carry. And as the light returns in nature, we’re invited to reclaim our own — not by consuming more, but by shedding what was never true. Love doesn’t need to be spectacular to be real. It needs to be alive.