Do You Feel Pressure Around Valentine’s Day? |
Valentine’s Day is supposed to be a day of love and romance. We see heart-shaped decorations wherever we look. Couples are anxious to make restaurant reservations at the most coveted spots to maximize the romance they expect from this day. However, romance might significantly be dampened for some of us who feel pressure from their partners or from friends and family. For some, Valentine’s Day might feel more like a relationship performance review, when partners try to get a sense of each other’s commitment and effort by evaluating each other’s romantic performance. This evaluative quality stems not just from each partner’s personal insecurities or inquisitive questions from others. Rather, it emerges from well-documented psychological mechanisms involving temporal landmarks and social comparison, which can converge unusually strongly around this holiday.
Research on temporal landmarks has shown that special days in the calendar........