2.17.25 // Valentine's Day 2025

I want to not love Valentine’s Day.

(And yes, I’m posting this a few days late, after the tidal wave of love declarations and heart-shaped everything, because love, like celebration, doesn’t need perfect timing to be real.)

For the past two years on Valentine’s Day, I’ve posted photos of myself in bed, reveling in the feeling of my own allure, declaring that one day of love is not enough. I stand by this. Love: self-love, romantic love, platonic love… deserves more than a prescribed 24 hours.

But still, I find that I do love Valentine’s Day. Not for the roses or the dinner reservations, not for the commercialization of affection, but because I’ve learned something about myself as the years tick by: I love an excuse to celebrate.

And I wonder… maybe celebration is the antidote to time slipping too quickly through our hands. Maybe it’s how we mark the immeasurable, how we force life to slow down just long enough to count the small victories, to acknowledge the ephemeral, to revel in the rare and ordinary magic of existence.

Perhaps the greatest rebellion against time’s unrelenting march isn’t resistance, but revelry.