why is Valentine's day worthy of such derision that people sneer and denigrate those that want another opportunity to celebrate with those that love them?
It's a good question and this is a personal answer as I accept that people have widely different perspectives on this.
I guess for me: Christmas and other festivals have also veered a long way from their original intention but they do attempt to celebrate a human fundamental truth: family love, community, looking after others less fortunate than ourselves. Yes this has become rampantly commercial but there are universal truths which underpin this.
Valentine's Day in its current incarnation is a celebration of something which is in itself a totally false construct: romantic love. Romantic love as an idea is a fairly recent development and creates a veneer of respectability for two competing and often conflicting impulses: sex and the desire to collaborate economically.
A modern relationship is usually an attempt to yoke together those two competing impulses: it tries to create an infrastructure around the desire to have sex and to turn something fundamentally unstable into a stable framework for the support of children and an economic unit.
There's nothing wrong with that: for many of us a committed relationship is probably the best way to organise our lives. But the "romance" that's layered onto it is a fundamentally fake construct. A good long term relationship is built on many things: friendship, expediency, shared goals, children, economic necessity and hopefully sex. In a good and lasting relationship some if not all of these will be present. But romance is a notion that is designed to legitimise lust, longing and sex. It's completely at odds with the notion of a stable relationship.
I'm not comfortable with this because it doesn't reflect the reality of my relationship. I don't believe my relationship is in any way improved because my partner remembers on one day a year that he has to buy me flowers from a petrol station. He should be supporting and loving me throughout the year and if he has to do this once a year "because romance" its a sign to me that something else isn't working.
For me, this is why everything about Valentines is so icky and naff. It's because its an attempt to paper over a fundamental tension at its heart, with a healthy layer of commercialism. And it doesn't work.
I know not everyone sees it like this and its a free country -- people are free to do what they want to do. But enough of us do that there must be something to it.