Platonic Valentines

Senior Arya Das finds that celebrating friendships is very valuable, but is often overlooked. While Das met her friends Navya Rao and Aarushi Agrawal in middle school, they only became close when they entered high school together. Since then, they have been good friends, eating lunch together every day before quarantine and sending each other Singing Valentines since Das is a part of MVHS choir. 

“We can talk about anything — we’re always joking with each other,” Das said. “We never have any reservations [and] we’re never competing against each other for anything. But it’s also serious because I know that if I have something on my mind, I can trust them with anything that’s happening in my life, and they can trust me.  Likewise, Senior Christy Feng says she values her relationships with her best friends: Sydney Hirai, Ashwin Desai and Eric Li. Feng has known Desai since elementary school and Hirai since middle school. She then became close friends with Li through her pre-calculus class in high school. She talks to them every day and she hopes that she can sustain these relationships throughout her life.

“Friendship [is] important to me because friends are who you want to share your happy moments with,” Feng said. “They are people that I can trust to rely on. When you’re a senior, with all your friends [you think] ‘Do I want to stay friends with this person after I graduate? And that’s what kind of truly determines how tight you are with them. The people I’m really close with now are people I want to stay in touch with after high school [and] for the rest of our lives.”

Although Feng is in a romantic relationship and views Valentine’s Day as a day to celebrate with a significant other, she believes Valentine’s Day focuses too much on romance.

“I think in the past there’s been too much of an emphasis on your significant other,” Feng said. “Everyone’s life revolved around finding a husband or finding a wife, so I think ever since then, [Valentine’s Day] has always just been celebrating your significant other, and you don’t really celebrate the other important people in your life. But I would say we should because those are really important types of love.”

English teacher Vennessa Nava also values these other kinds of relationships and tries to express that on Valentine’s day through gratitude. She attempts to combat this lack of gratitude by having her students write gratitude cards for the people in their lives for Valentine’s Day.

“I find that it is very common that people take the people in their life for granted — they do appreciate them, but then they don’t always express it in words,” Nava said. “And I think that in our digital lives, we’re used to sending off an email [or a] text … and I think that handwriting a note to someone and sending it to them in the mail is a really nice gesture … especially if what you write in a card is heartfelt and thoughtful and genuine.”

Nava usually celebrates Valentine’s Day in smaller ways and doesn’t give or receive large gifts. She generally does not exchange gifts during holidays, choosing to focus more on spending time with her family and friends. She finds that Valentine’s Day especially focuses too much on celebrating romance rather than quality time with loved ones.

“The fixation on romantic love during Valentine’s Day can be an injury for people that are in a position where their romantic life isn’t where they want it to be,” Nava said. “It’s so very commercialized. It’s so [focused on] buying candy and flowers and that can be enjoyable, but I just want to shift the focus on that day to other expressions of love. I think American culture fixates on romantic storylines in a way that is unhealthy and I think that if we could de-emphasize that to some extent and instead embrace all the ways that various relationships in our lives support us and nourish us, I think that we wouldn’t put so much pressure on romantic relationships to serve every single one of our needs.”

Likewise, Das says she agrees that Valentine’s Day can be seen as a materialistic holiday. However, she believes Valentine’s Day’s main focus should be a day to appreciate the people around you.

“We forget that we can’t survive off one [kind of] love,” Das said. “We need all types of love to fuel us. I think friends are probably the most important love that you have [because] they’re in pretty much every situation and you’re helping each other through these experiences. Growing from a child to an adult with someone else is the strongest bond you can have.”