Every Valentine’s Day outside forces gather strength throughout the universe in an attempt to force us to be to be romantic. Don’t get me wrong; romance is not a bad thing. In fact, I’d say we need a lot more of it these days. But shouldn’t romance naturally be spontaneous? Doesn’t being pressured to painstakingly plan for a magical Valentine’s event sap the romance out of the day? Even in years in which I’ve been happily involved in a relationship, I’ve never liked the idea of Valentine’s Day. What are the choices? I can follow the crowd and buy chocolate or flowers or take my sweetie out to dinner; or I could do nothing, and thus be labeled as completely unromantic and a curmudgeon.

And yes, other options exist besides dinner, flowers or chocolate, but even so, the pressure to produce is unwieldy. It’s the expectations and the disappointments. Many women seem to have these fairytale notions of a romantic day complete with Prince Charming.

For men, well, I saw a couple of commercials a few years ago with an interesting spin on the day. The commercials, aimed toward men, have as a theme that if you get something for your woman, you will get something in return. One such commercial was narrated by Adam Corolla, formerly of The Man Show and the “Loveline” radio program and MTV show with Dr. Drew. The commercial, for a company called Vermont Teddy Bear, dripped with cheesy sexual innuendo and suggests, heavily, that buying a teddy bear will open your woman’s, um, heart to you.

The other commercial that I found a bit disturbing in its distortion of the holiday for the carnal pleasures of men was for an online “pajama” retailer (pajamagram.com). The announcer insinuated that whether you get something for her (sensible cotton pajamas, for instance) or something for “you” (perhaps something a little sexier such as a sheer kimono), you will be showered in sex.

So as if the forced romance wasn’t bad enough, now the plan, plainly stated, is just a smidgen away from prostitution. Essentially, men are supposed to purchase sex in this ode to Saint Valentine. Seriously. This is the best that our society has come up with? (Note: A little research found that Vermont Teddy Bear and pajamagram.com were actually sister companies.)

The exploitation and commercialization of yet another holiday is one thing, and overall a fairly insignificant thing. But a day with such an emphasis on couples and love did get me thinking about the modern-day societal fantasy of meeting a soul mate, falling deeply and passionately in love, having all your needs and desires filled by this other person and the two of you living in monogamous bliss for the rest of your lives.

Let’s take a look at the flaws in that theory. The first is that we meet a soul mate. I was married once. But suppose she would have remained married to her first husband. Suppose I was quite satisfied in my mid-twenties with my life as a very popular ladies’ man with no need to settle down. (We’re just supposing here. Don’t ruin my fantasy.)

Am I to think that neither of us would have ever thought we were in love with someone else, that there’s no way we would have, could have, married anyone else if our random lives didn’t put us both working at the same company in the early 1990s? People get married to childhood sweethearts from their small hometowns all the time. Are we to think that of all the souls in the world, those two young lovers from Valentine, Nebraska, were destined to be together forever?

And then there’s the whole marriage thing. The fairytale concept of marriage that we hold in this country is relatively new. It was once common (and still is in some parts of the world) for marriages to be arranged by family members. Marriages were often designed to increase a family’s wealth or power or just to establish a reasonable financial situation. Love rarely played a part in the matter of matrimony.

I read a column in The New York Times (published on Valentine’s Day a few years ago) by Stephanie Coontz that emphasized this point. It said, “In fact, Christian veneration of married love is hard to discern in the first 1,500 years of church history. As one 12th-century authority wrote, no one ‘disapproves’ when ‘a gentle and honest sentiment’ softens the bonds of a marriage, but ‘it is not the role of marriage to inspire such a feeling.’ Similarly, it was not the role of such tender feelings to inspire marriage.”

The idea of monogamy throughout history has waned more than it’s crested, and it seems to be waning again. Besides evolving social mores, our lifestyles have changed. We are less of an agrarian society. We don’t need nine kids to help us in the fields. We have effective forms of birth control. We travel more and have more opportunities to meet people, including members of the opposite sex. And we live longer. In 1900, for instance, the average life expectancy in the United States was 47. Today it’s 78. Perhaps we can stick it out with someone under the right circumstances for a few years, but for 30 or 40 … or 60? Add to that the modern-day notion held by many that everything is supposed to be blissful all the time. I really don’t see that happening.

Then we add kids to the mix. Far from the utilitarian concept of children from generations ago, we now have kids to make the family complete, but sometimes at the expense of the marital relationship. In another New York Times editorial on Valentine’s Day, we had these words from Judith Warner: “In many marriages, erotic love has been supplanted by what The New Yorker once called ‘the eros of parenthood.’ Up to 20 percent of couples now report having sex no more than 10 times a year, qualifying them for what the experts call ‘sexless marriages.’ Many mothers freely admit to preferring their children’s touch to their husband’s, without regret or shame.”

What I get from this is, “Wow, some married people have sex more than 10 times a year? I was seriously missing out back then.” But I digress.

The point is that five years after our child was born, my ex finally finished her Ph.D. and was working as an assistant professor, an occupation she had aspired to for nearly a decade. She had her child. She had her career. I was no longer needed—or wanted. And like 50 percent of all marriages in America, our one-time thoughts of a happy life together turned into divorce.

Despite my personal experience and overwhelming evidence that the current concept of love and marriage is severely askew in this country, I want to believe. I recall the movie Love Actually and how it ends with people coming together and illustrates the happiness that being in love brings to people.

But maybe it’s that focus on the happiness that love often brings that precludes us from lasting happiness in our relationships. Perhaps we just have to be prepared for some pain to go with our love, to accept that, in the words of Nazareth, “love hurts.” We need to understand that love is not 100 percent bliss and committed relationships are not always happy.

So as Sam said to his stepfather Daniel in Love Actually, “Let’s go get the shit kicked out of us by love.”

Tim W. Jackson’s girlfriend knows he’s not really a curmudgeon. He just plays one on TV.