Written by Alex Mcclain
For years, people have joked that Valentine’s Day is really just “Singles’ Awareness Day.” Well, the Student Association made it official. On Feb. 11, Harding’s campus will celebrate the faux holiday.
The SA said it has wanted to do a campus-wide Valentine’s Day celebration for a long time. They decided this year to focus on the Singles’ Awareness Day joke because people in relationships usually have plans for that day.
The Thursday before the holiday was chosen because Valentine’s Day falls on a Sunday this year. Nathan Dullnig and the other planners of the event thought it would be easier to get people involved on a day with classes.
“We want to create an atmosphere where people can’t avoid it,” Dullnig said. “There’s a basketball game that night so there will be something about it there. There will be something about it in the Caf. It will be all over the student center.”
Singles’ Awareness Day is also an opportunity for Harding to poke fun at itself and its reputation for being a university to find a spouse, according to J.T. Hill, an organizer of the event.
“We looked at what makes Harding unique and all the clichés like three swings and a ring or the marriage factory, and Valentine’s Day kind of encompassed all that and epitomized what was goofy about the university,” Hill said. “It’s really just a chance to make fun of ourselves.”
There will be a mixer for the day on the front lawn hosted by the Harding Walking Society called “Walk for the Cure of Singleness” and there will be a speed-dating event in the cafeteria. Also, on Singles’ Awareness Day, people will be asked to dress according to their relationship status.
“If you’re single you wear green, if it’s complicated you wear yellow and if you’re in a relationship you wear red. And that’s just kind of another fun thing to do but we also feel like we’ll kind of get visual reminders” Hill said.
According to the SA, those visual reminders are just what they want. Often, events on campus are announced in chapel but lost in the shuffle of the day. There will also be a department of PDA Police going around on Singles’ Awareness Day blowing whistles, literally, on non-singles flaunting their relationship status.
“We’ll hopefully have something for [the PDA police] to wear and we’ll give them a whistle and explain to them what they’re doing,” Dullnig said.
“The SA is really excited about it, we’re having fun with it so it’ll be a little easier to kind of rope people in,” Hill said. “We want to get people emotionally involved.”
