Valentineʼs Day in Nigeria has become less about love and more about the appearance of love, less about intimacy and more about its price tag.
By Joseph Jonathan
Earlier this year, Nigerian social media circles were awash with vendors who flooded timelines with Valentineʼs Day packages—heart-shaped cakes, breakfast-in-bed bundles, couplesʼ spa deals, luxury picnic setups—that someone noticed the obvious: there appeared to be more Valentineʼs packages than people actually in relationships to buy them. The meme spread quickly, as part mockery and part recognition. We were watching aspiration collide with reality in real time, the market manufacturing demand for a holiday that increasingly felt like a performance with no audience.
The joke of the meme landed because it named something we all sensed but rarely said aloud: Valentineʼs Day in Nigeria has become less about love and more about the appearance of love, less about intimacy and more about its price tag.
By mid-January, when roses hadnʼt even bloomed, and restaurants hadnʼt yet printed their inflated February 14th menus, the economy of romance was already in full swing. Vendors were hustling, influencers were partnering with brands, and the rest of us were calculating whether we could afford to participate in a ritual we werenʼt entirely sure we believed in.
But hereʼs the complexity that easy cynicism misses: even as we mock the commercialisation, even as we joke about the overpriced packages and performative gestures, we still want something. We still crave the flowers, the dinner reservations, the handwritten note slipped into a bag. We still need romance, even when we know it’s being sold to us. The scam isnʼt that Valentineʼs Day exists, itʼs that capitalism has convinced us thereʼs only one expensive, visible, market-approved way to perform it.
The Making of a Consumer Holiday
Valentineʼs Day didnʼt arrive in Nigeria as a fully formed commercial juggernaut. Like many Western imports, it came in waves; through colonial education systems that taught European calendar rituals, through American films and music videos that made romantic gestures legible, through the explosion of consumer culture in the 1990s and 2000s as Nigeriaʼs middle class grew and global brands spotted new markets. By the time MTV Base and Nollywood had taught a generation what love was supposed to look like, Valentineʼs Day had a foothold.
Whatʼs worth noting is how quickly a borrowed holiday became native to Nigeriaʼs social imagination. Valentineʼs Day here isnʼt a relic of colonialism that people tolerate—itʼs been actively claimed, remixed, and integrated into the texture of urban life. University campuses shut down for it. Churches hold singlesʼ mixers and couplesʼ renewal ceremonies. Hotels triple their rates. The holiday works because it taps into something real: the desire for ritual in a culture where traditional marriage rites are becoming increasingly expensive and inaccessible for young people, where cohabitation is still largely taboo, where relationships often exist in a kind of social limbo: acknowledged but not formalised, intimate but not institutionalised.
Valentineʼs Day offers a placeholder, a moment when love gets to be visible and celebrated without the weight of bride price negotiations or family approval. For young Nigerians navigating relationships in cities where rent is high and wages are low, where marriage feels economically distant, Valentineʼs became one of the few calendar dates where romantic relationships could be publicly acknowledged without prejudice. The problem isn’t that we adopted the holiday. The problem is that it arrived pre-packaged with capitalist assumptions about what love requires.
The sociologist Eva Illouz calls this “emotional capitalism” —the process by which markets donʼt just exploit our feelings but actively shape what we think feelings should look like. In her work on how romance became commodified in the West, Illouz argues that capitalism didnʼt just commercialise love; it produced our contemporary ideas of what romance requires. Flowers, chocolates, candlelit dinners; these arenʼt timeless expressions of affection. Theyʼre 20th-century inventions, heavily marketed scripts that taught people how to perform intimacy in ways that conveniently required purchasing power.
In Nigeria, this script arrived late but landed hard. By the 2010s, as smartphones and social media turned private life into public performance, Valentineʼs Day became less about couples and more about appearing coupled. Instagram stories needed proof.
Twitter needed romance content. The holiday became a deadline for visible affection, and visibility required spending. A private dinner at home wouldnʼt photograph well. A handwritten letter wouldnʼt trend without a rose to match and cameras to capture it. The market had successfully turned intimacy into an aesthetic, and aesthetics require products.
The Economics of Romantic Performance
The meme about Valentineʼs packages outnumbering relationships wasnʼt just funny, it was diagnostic. It revealed the gap between the marketʼs imagination of demand and the material reality of young Nigeriansʼ lives. In a country where inflation has eroded purchasing power, where fuel subsidies have been removed, and transportation costs have skyrocketed, where many young people are un- or underemployed, the expectation to spend lavishly on Valentineʼs Day has become almost comedic in its cruelty.
Yet, the pressure persists, and itʼs heavily gendered. The unspoken rule remains: men spend, women receive. A boyfriend who doesnʼt “do” Valentineʼs risks being labelled stingy, unserious, or worse, broke. The holiday becomes a test of masculinity measured in naira, a public audit of a manʼs ability to provide.
Women, meanwhile, are expected to perform gratitude for gestures they didnʼt necessarily ask for, to post the gifts, to validate the expense with visible excitement. The transaction is clear: he buys visibility, she provides social proof. Failure to participate becomes a moral and relational judgment: “If he didn’t do anything for Valentineʼs, he doesn’t love you.”
This gendered economy of Valentineʼs maps onto broader anxieties about masculinity and provision in a contracting economy. When good jobs are scarce and financial stability feels like a distant dream, Valentineʼs Day becomes one of the few opportunities for men to loudly perform the provider role, even temporarily. The pressure to spend isnʼt just romantic, itʼs existential. Itʼs about proving you can take care of someone in a system designed to make care expensive.
But what happens to the men who canʼt afford the performance? What happens to relationships that operate outside these scripts entirely? Queer couples, for instance, often navigate Valentineʼs Day in a different register—less public spectacle, more private ritual, because visibility itself can be dangerous. Working-class couples might skip the holiday entirely, not out of disinterest but out of practical impossibility. And increasingly, even middle-class couples are opting out, tired of the financial and emotional labour required to meet expectations that feel more like obligations.
The vendor economy that the meme highlighted is itself worth examining. Whoʼs selling these packages? Often, small business owners, side hustlers, and people trying to make money in an economy with few formal opportunities. Valentineʼs Day has become a hustle, a seasonal income stream for florists, bakers, event planners, and photographers.
The tragedy isnʼt that love is being sold; it’s that selling love has become one of the few viable business models for young entrepreneurs. The market hasnʼt just commercialised intimacy; itʼs made intimacy one of the few remaining markets.
Why Romance Survives Capitalism
Hereʼs what the cynics miss: humans have always used symbols to make feelings legible. Gifts, gestures, and rituals arenʼt capitalist inventions. Theyʼre how we externalise internal states, how we make the invisible visible. A flower has never just been a flower. Itʼs been a signal, a promise, a risk. The problem isnʼt that we need symbols. The problem is that capitalism has monopolised symbol-making.
Romance persists because we need it. Not the Hallmark version, not the Instagram version, but the underlying impulse; to be seen, to be chosen, to have someone mark your importance with time, attention, care. The Valentineʼs Day packages are a distortion of that need, not evidence that the need is fake. When someone saves money to buy their partnerʼs favourite meal, when someone writes a letter at 2 a.m. trying to name what they feel, when someone plans a surprise that requires no money but deep attention, that’s romance. Thatʼs the thing capitalism tries to package but canʼt fully contain.
Whatʼs striking about the discourse around Valentineʼs Day in Nigeria is how much of it is self-aware. People participate while simultaneously mocking participation. They buy the roses and post the memes about overpriced roses in the same breath. This isnʼt cognitive dissonance, it’s negotiation. It’s people saying: I know this is constructed, I know I’m being sold to, but I still want the ritual. I still want the day marked. I still want to give and receive care, even if the only available language for care has been commercialised.
And quietly, away from the vendor timelines and the influencer partnerships, people are already creating alternatives. Some couples celebrate on February 15th when prices drop. Some pool resources for group hangouts instead of expensive couple dates, making Valentineʼs communal rather than private. Some exchange playlists, write letters, cook together, take long walks—gestures that require presence, not purchasing power. These aren’t “anti-capitalist” alternatives in any pure sense. They’re just people refusing to let the market have the last word on what love looks like.
Reclaiming the Ritual
The real work isn’t abolishing Valentineʼs Day, it’s denaturalising it. It’s remembering that this holiday, like all holidays, is a social construction, which means it can be reconstructed. The symbols of love aren’t fixed. A rose isn’t inherently more romantic than a handwritten recipe, a restaurant reservation isn’t inherently more meaningful than a morning spent cooking breakfast together. We’ve been taught otherwise, but we can unlearn it.
This isn’t about moral purity or rejecting all commercial exchange. It’s about asking: what do we actually want from this day? If we stripped away the social media pressure, the gendered expectations, the economic anxiety; what would we want to give and receive? For some, that might still be dinner and flowers. For others, it might be silence and rest. For others still, it might be nothing at all, because love doesn’t need a calendar date to be real.
What’s needed is permission: to opt out without shame, to participate without breaking the bank, to rewrite the scripts entirely. The vendors will keep selling packages because that’s what markets do. But we don’t have to buy the story they’re selling alongside the product. We don’t have to accept that love is measurable in naira or that romance requires receipts.
Is Valentineʼs Day a Scam?
The meme about too many Valentineʼs packages was funny because it revealed the absurdity of manufactured demand. But underneath the humour was a real question: what are we actually trying to buy? Security? Proof? Status? Or are we trying to buy something we already have but don’t know how to name without a price tag attached?
Valentineʼs Day is a scam in the sense that all commercial holidays are scams; they profit from real human needs by offering narrow, expensive solutions to universal longings. But romance isn’t the scam. Romance is the longing itself, the need to make private feelings public, to mark time with tenderness, to create shared rituals that say: this matters, you matter, we matter.
The problem isn’t that we want these things. The problem is living in an economy that insists the only way to have them is to pay for them. The work ahead isn’t rejecting Valentineʼs Day but rejecting the idea that capitalism owns intimacy, that markets get to decide what counts as love.
Valentine’s Day will continue to exist, and people will continue to celebrate it. There is nothing inherently wrong with buying flowers or going on a date. The problem arises when love is reduced to what can be bought, photographed, and posted.
We can keep the holiday if we want. We can keep the flowers, the dinners, and the chocolate. But we have to remember: these are tools, not requirements. Symbols, not substitutes. And the best romance—the kind that survives long after February 14th, long after the packages are delivered and the restaurants return to normal pricing—is the kind that never needed a vendor in the first place. It’s the kind you build together, with or without a calendar’s permission.
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big