Sarci-Sense: Have we trivialised Love into Once-a-Year Event?

Valentine’s Day is the one day of the year when adults behave like love is a product with a deadline. Roses must be bought, dinners must be booked, photographs must be uploaded, and affection must be proven before midnight. It is less a celebration of intimacy and more an annual audit of whether your relationship still looks alive in public.

Most couples are not in love that evening. They are simply performing it efficiently.

There is something faintly comic about watching an entire society panic over romance on a single date. People who barely speak at home suddenly need candlelight. People who have not listened to each other in months suddenly need violins. Couples who communicate mostly through grocery lists suddenly require a perfect caption about forever.

And that is the first delusion. We have mistaken love for spectacle.

Modern couples are not short of emotion. They are drowning in it. Anxiety, ambition, insecurity, exhaustion, comparison, the constant pressure of being seen and judged. Love does not disappear because we stop feeling. It disappears because we feel too much, too loudly, about everything else.

Somewhere between deadlines and notifications, love comes much later. Or it has already quietly left the room?

We have inherited an idea of romance that is heavy on intensity and light on stamina. Valentine’s Day is built around fireworks. The grand gesture. The curated proof. The kind of love that looks good under restaurant lighting.

But long-term love does not look like a movie.

Long-term love looks like a random Tuesday.

The real misunderstanding couples carry is this belief that love is an emotion that must always feel intense. That the early stage of romance is the truth, and everything after is compromise. That if passion fades, something is wrong.

Nothing is wrong. Passion always fades.

The beginning of love is biology’s marketing campaign. It is limerence. It is intoxication. Nature’s way of ensuring you stay long enough to bond. It feels effortless. It feels like destiny. It feels like the universe is finally being kind.

Then life begins.

Real love is not the constant presence of butterflies. Real love is what remains when the butterflies have moved on to someone else’s Instagram story.

This is where many of us get confused. We think love is something we fall into. We do not realise love is something we choose. We believe love should feel like a permanent high. We do not understand that love is mostly a quiet decision.

Love is a choice, not a mood.

The second delusion is the myth of happily ever after.

We were sold a fantasy that good relationships are smooth. That the right partner means constant bliss. That true love is easy.

True love is not easy. True love is ordinary.

It involves seeing the same person every day, with their habits, moods, silences, flaws, and unfinished edges. It involves accepting that your partner is not a fantasy character designed for your emotional needs. They are a human being, with their own exhaustion, childhood, anxieties, and invisible burdens.

Love is not finding perfection. Love is learning to live with imperfection without turning it into resentment.

And love is not self-sustaining.

Relationships do not run on sentiment. They run on effort. Small effort. Daily effort. The kind that will never trend.

A relationship is not a source of constant happiness. It is a mechanism for navigating life. It is two people deciding, consciously, that they will build goodwill even when life becomes dull, difficult, repetitive, or unfair.

Love is built, not just felt.

Modern culture does not like this idea because it is unglamorous. Effort sounds like work. Work sounds like duty. Duty sounds like boredom. We want romance to be spontaneous, not maintained. We want love to arrive fully formed, not constructed slowly through attention.

But the truth is, the most lasting relationships are not the most passionate ones. They are the most intentional ones.

Conflict, too, is normal. Disagreements are not evidence of failure. They are evidence of difference. Two separate minds sharing one life might collide.

Healthy couples are not those who never fight. They are those who do not give up during the fighting.

Modern dating culture treats conflict like a red flag. Real love treats conflict like weather. It comes. It passes. You learn how to stay indoors together without burning the house down.

And perhaps the most underrated skill in love is assuming positive intent.

Most relationships do not collapse because someone forgot an anniversary. They collapse because people stop giving each other grace. A delayed reply becomes disrespect. A distracted week becomes neglect. A careless comment becomes cruelty.

Love survives when couples assume, gently, that the other person is not the enemy.

But love is not a bouquet. Love is attention.

Which brings us to the pun that matters.

Perhaps what we need is not Valentine’s love, but “well, in time” love.

The kind of love that is not loud once a year, but steady all year. The kind of love that does not arrive in a gift box, but grows quietly through patience, forgiveness, shared boredom, shared laughter, shared repair.

Love is not a festival. It is a practice.

It is easy to fall in love. Falling requires gravity, not character. Staying requires something else entirely.

Staying requires restraint in a culture addicted to novelty. Staying requires listening in a culture addicted to speaking. Staying requires forgiveness in a culture addicted to ego.

And that is why modern love feels fragile. Not because people have become immoral. But because people have become impatient. We want the reward without the routine. We want intimacy without inconvenience. We want romance without responsibility.

We want love to feel permanent without behaving like it is.

So if you must celebrate love this February, do it differently.

Ask instead, “Are we still choosing each other when nobody is watching?”

Because the real tragedy is not that love fades. Love always fades in its early form.

The tragedy is that most people confuse the fading of obsession with the end of love, and then spend the rest of their lives chasing new beginnings instead of learning how to stay.

Valentine’s Day will give you flowers.

Only time will tell you if you have love.