Galentine’s Day is exactly as it sounds: February 14 spent with your gals instead of your partner. There is no exact way that this celebration is done; it just entails spending quality time with your girls and embracing a different kind of love than romance, which is given all of the spotlight on Valentine’s Day. With this fact in mind, many girls at Hale celebrate this holiday in different ways with the same end goal—to be with friends.
As for activities, there is a broad range that could be done on this day. For example, junior Leia Isgur made heart-shaped pizzas and cute drinks with her friend-group (strictly girls!). When asked if any guys would be allowed, Isgur replied “It’s GALentines—definitely not!”
Junior Emina Kuhn had fun plans with her friend-group as well. ”We played games, and took cute pictures, and made it all pretty, and pink, and cute lighting,” Kuhn said. Pink was a common factor for Galentines. Both of these friend groups had strict themes for pink colored clothes as well as other things that resembled Valentine’s day. “Everybody wore pink,” Isgur said. “Pink and red.”
While the history of female friend-oriented celebrations have, most likely, been happening for a while on Valentine’s Day, the actual term “Galentines” can be traced back to an exact day! The show “Parks and Recreation” coined this term in 2010, when the main character Leslie Knope hosted a celebratory brunch with all of her girlfriends on February 13th. And ever since then, the term has gained prominence and done a great part to work against the romantic conventions of Valentine’s Day.
Valentine’s Day almost solely revolves around romance. At least, that is how it feels most of the time. It’s a holiday that has for many years and continues to be heavily romance-centered. And by romance, I mean coupley, partner love. Through continuous celebration of, solely this kind of love, it now feels that it is the only form of love that is acceptable to celebrate. It is refreshing to see platonic love, that so many of us girls have, become celebrated too, as it holds just as much importance, if not more, than romance.
“Obviously, you’re not just in love with one person; you share love with your friends too,” said Kuhn. “It’s kind of a day when everyone is with their boyfriend so it’s nice to have those friends.” She described the ways that Galentines helps to affirm the importance of love within friendships, and how it is equally important to celebrate that type of love.
Romance is amazing and this type of love is one that everyone should hope to experience at some point in their life. It only makes sense that people love love (specifically this kind), enough to make a holiday continuously surrounding it. However, looking at the big picture, there are so many different types of love that we experience on a daily basis that should be equally celebrated.
This continuous celebration of only romantic love forces a very singular, limited frame of mind on us, one that says that only romantic love is worthy or important enough to have. While this simply is not true, this gives us an “all or nothing” perspective. If the time comes around for Valentine’s Day to be celebrated, and you are single, then Valentine’s should automatically be a sad day for you. This pushes feelings of disappointment and dejection upon those who do not have a “valentine” or anyone to share the romantic, valentine-y love with.
You can see why this might be an issue—so many people will just happen to be single on Valentine’s Day! That is just how it is. People fall in love on their own timeline. And that is no bad thing either, so we need to stop pushing these conventions upon people. Galentine’s Day is so important because it reinforces a couple of very essential ideas. Firstly, it is OK to be single on Valentine’s Day— it does not make you worthless and it certainly does not mean that you cannot celebrate love. Secondly, Galentine’s is normalizing the importance of platonic love, specifically that between girlfriends, which is one of the most important bonds you will have in your life. Isgur says it best: “Your female friendships are really important, if not more important than your relationship with a man.” And they deserve that credit!