The Big Billion Valentine’s Day Industry!

The date 14^th of February may seem impromptu at first, but when you hear Valentine’s Day, all hell breaks loose! If you just started a relationship, chances are you are bound to do something ‘amazing’to express your feelings and show how much your other half means to you. Well you are not the only one going down this road on February 14^th, and there will be millions of kindred souls around the world seeking to make a mark on this day. No wonder Valentine’s Day is a billion-dollar industry!

My boyfriend and I had contributed a tidy little sum to the Valentine’s Day Foundation of in-love Fools sorry Souls, the year before. We had gone on a romanticValentine’s Day dinner cruise on the Sydney Harbour  to celebrate our first V-day. It was a great experience,with the delicious food and wine paired with excellent views of the Sydney skyline. We had a fun time enjoying the hospitality and will do it again in the future.

Going a bit overboard to make your first Valentine’s Day is acceptable, but doing it year after year is squandering one’s wealth! If you need grand gestures to keep your relationship alive, both of you need to do some introspection. Valentine’s Day celebrations are becoming a norm now and part of the culture, most of it down to movies and marketing. All sense seem to leave people on this day, as they let the heart do all the thinking, leaving the brain out of the equation!

We decided to not go with the flock and do something different, come V-day. The easy thing would have been to donate the money set aside for Valentine’s Day celebrations for charitable means. But we decided to do better than that.

There are lots of shelters for the old, homeless and children,as there isn’t any differentiation in age for being poor and needy. These shelters require volunteers round the year, especially during holidays, and that’s how we decided to spend Valentine’s Day, by choosing to spend our time with the less fortunate.

Spending time at these shelters lends perspective to one’s life and how lucky we are, having a warm home to go back every day and a bed of our own to sleep in. The world here can be a new one for many, with things that we take for granted like food and clothes, a luxury for the people here. You can also learn valuable lessons from them as they fight against the odds, despite being dealt a bad hand in life, but in the end it all depends on how you play your cards.

It was a special Valentine’s Day for us and a truly memorable one. The happiness that we got from spending time volunteering is a warm fuzzy feeling and no number of roses or candlelight dinners can’t come close to replicating it. That day brought us closer than any Valentine’s Day celebration could have, and I also realised that I found the man that I want to spend the rest of my life with. So, Valentine’s Day turned out to be a day of love indeed!