The problem with Galentine's Day (2024)

Loneliness is more of a curse for men, especially as they get older

February 12, 2024 11:00 am(Updated 2:42 pm)

Happy Galentine’s Day! Especially if you’re reading this on Tuesday, for the official date of the celebration of friendships is 13 February, the day before the more emetic – I mean, romantic (I mean emetic) – traditions of Valentine’s Day rush in and sweep away all before them.

Two caveats before we begin. One, of course Galentine’s Day is a criminally terrible moniker.

There’s no excuse for it, and I cannot even begin to formulate one here. It should be prosecuted under all sorts of statutes and in international courts. Two, I am aware that it is – like Father’s Day and assorted other capitalised Days with which every year sees our calendars further strewn – a carefully calibrated invention by marketing mavens to get us to part with more of our cash on an inexorably spreading pool of tatty merchandise.

I get all that. And yet. And yet… Just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, out of marketing cynicism can occasionally, and wholly inadvertently, arise something for the very slight betterment of humanity instead of something that further greases our already near-frictionless path towards the abyss.

Such a tiny something is Galentine’s Day – or at least the idea behind Galentine’s Day.

I am all for anything that values and validates the power of friendship. Anything that shifts the cultural lens, customarily trained on love, sex, coupledom to the exclusion of all other forms of emotional attachment, to all the other relationships we have that make life worth living.

Society’s emphasis on the importance of finding a romantic partner does us all such a disservice. It makes us vulnerable to settling for people who aren’t necessarily right (and in some cases are terribly wrong for us). But more iniquitously it stops us putting effort into finding friends and nurturing the bonds that often will then last a lifetime.

The earlier we realise the importance of this and start doing it, the better off we are. There is no substitute for a shared history. Someone who has known you since primary school knows you in a way that is impossible for another to replicate. The older you get, naturally, long shared histories become more numerous. My university friends and I have now known each other for nearly 30 years, though it seems more like 10 minutes (a fact we will periodically sit round a pub table and marvel at as – ironically – only a bunch of nearly-50 year olds who have known each other since they were 18-year-old idiots can).

According to various studies (and your own life history and anecdotage will probably bear out its truth), your friendship network is at its broadest in your mid-20s. You won’t have lost touch with all your schoolmates (yet), there are all your uni pals and there are all the people you are meeting at work and all the people you are meeting through them, and on dates and all the exciting rest of it. But at the same time, we are encouraged to see much of this as the means to the end of finding a boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse/life partner-with-the-binding-title-of-your-choice. When what we should be encouraged to do is find those friends for life. Those wonderful people who will make you laugh, who have seen you in the raw, at good times and in bad, who understand you, support you, have your back and tell you hard truths (the last two often at the same time) and for whom you have done the same, gladly, out of love, not duty.

The older you get, the more valuable friendships become. Whatever teenagers and young, rosy-cheeked and rose-receiving people think, it is adult problems that are real problems and require a phalanx of people round you who know and love you to your bones.

I’d like Galentine’s Day to be (as well as renamed asap) a gateway to all sorts of ways of privileging these relationships, no less precious for being platonic. We need friendcoms as well as romcoms, an abundance of poems about its myriad joys, rituals to attend the birth or death of a friendship, a recognised genre of literature so that we don’t leave it too late to amass the people and the relationships that will often endure longer than even the greatest marriage.

And of course, none of this should be confined to – take your anti-nausea meds now, I’m sorry – gal pals. Women are already better – that is to say, emotionally more liberated and therefore freer to make them, freer to maintain them in a culture that still treats male openness as suspect and weak – at friendship.

Loneliness is more of a curse for men, especially as they get older, and the lack of true friendship – if we define that as people you can speak openly to and/or who know you well enough to intuit when you are suffering and confront you about it – is surely a factor in the horrifyingly high rates of suicide among them. If it wasn’t another borderline nomenclatural criminal offence, I’d suggest that the marketeers throw their weight behind a more inclusive Palentine’s Day for 12 February, 2025. Until then, just tell everyone you love that you love them. You can do it any time of the year.