Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day [There is a large, shaded, red heart.] Because love isn't quite complicated enough as it is.

As mentioned in the comic, love is already pretty complicated, even more so on Valentine's Day . Valentine's Day makes it more complicated by introducing all kinds of questions. Is our relationship such that it should be acknowledged on Valentine's Day? If so, how? If by a card, what kind of card would be best? If by something more than a card, what? Candy? Flowers? A Date? What does the Valentine I received really mean? Friendship? Love? A covert request for sex? (see 63: Valentine - Heart ). As an example of the kinds of dilemmas that can arise, see also 1016: Valentine Dilemma .
The phrase "Because love isn't quite complicated enough as it is" is an obvious use of sarcasm , as love is really complicated, according to Randall ( see above ).
Referenced in the title text, Joey Comeau is the author of the webcomic A Softer World . It is a queer comic whose work also discusses love in various forms, so between them, Randall Munroe and he are a good team to consider working on "subverting the hetero-normative paradigm." Heteronormativity is the body of lifestyle norms holding that people fall into two distinct genders with natural and complementary roles in life. Whether or not anything that cartoons can do would fix the Valentine's Day problem is another issue. Among other things, ditching the hetero-normative paradigm presumably complicates things in terms of potential love relationships, which now include more possibilities than male-female, as is shown in 216: Romantic Drama Equation . All of these might face the Valentine's Day issues in various ways.
Valentine's Day [There is a large, shaded, red heart.] Because love isn't quite complicated enough as it is.
