VALENTINE'S Day. It can be awful, can't it? We all know the cliché. It involves sitting at a tiny table in a ludicrously expensive restaurant trying to make halting conversation over your heart-shaped parfait; or hibernating, as a single, with a box set until the whole nightmare is over. Except that there’s a new Valentine’s Day on the rise, and while it may still feature hearts and flowers, it’s irreverent, fun and inclusive. LGBT are welcome. Singles can join in. Even pets. Every woman, every man, every gender, every sexuality, every dog, every cat, every lonely heart, can join this caravan of love.

There is a growing new approach to the festival, one that doesn’t involve heterosexual couples, excruciating dates, or ramped-up consumerism, but is about solidarity, friendship and love for all. You could call this the rise of anti-Valentine’s, or even of the “alternative Valentine”. It’s there in anti-Valentine’s Day parties, Galentine’s day (celebration of female friendship) events, Palentine’s gatherings (for your pals), alternative cards, and the social media trend of loving-up of friends.

We, in the UK are buying and sending fewer Valentine’s cards, chocolates and flowers, and treating our loved-ones instead to “experiences”. Halloween has overtaken the date as our second biggest festival in terms of spending. But that doesn’t mean that Valentine’s Day is dying. Rather it’s changing. Some people are finding less materialist ways to celebrate it. Others are celebrating friends instead of lovers. Pets are getting more treats, as shops create whole sections of Valentine’s presents for cats and dogs. You can even, as the Climate Coalition suggest, show your love for the planet by making, wearing or sharing a green heart.

But, perhaps most crucially it is being reworked as a party and festival for all. The past few years have seen the rise globally, in popularity of anti-Valentine’s events and “Singles Awareness Day” activities. The backlash against Valentine’s day which has long had a slightly miserabilist tinge, is now developing the feel of a wild party or carnival. It is a festival in itself – of love in all its forms. For one’s friends, for one’s pets, for one’s family, even for oneself.

Edinburgh-based Pawel Orzechowski has been involved in organising an anti-Valentine’s concert, which took place last week. “The beef that people have with Valentine’s day,” says Orzechowski, “is that it’s very couple centric. You see this couple-centric phenomenon in almost every area of life. Buying a flat with another person is so much easier, so is renting a room.” For him, the concert is not so much anti-Valentine’s as “alternative” Valentine’s. “This is an alternative celebration of love in all its shapes and sizes.”

Couples are allowed to come to the concert, but, if they turn up, the rules dictate that they have to have a very public argument to show that, he says, “even though you are a couple it’s still terrible.” Orzechowski, who is in a relationship himself, jokes that his own arguments may revolve around stacking the dishwasher.

Most of those involved in anti-Valentine’s events see it, as Orzechowski puts it, as “just another excuse for a party”. “Anti-Valentine’s Day,” he says, “is the same party as Valentine’s Day. There are going to be the same chocolate hearts on it. It’s just trying to be more inclusive and communicate that it’s a holiday of love.”

This shift in attitude can not only be found in the range of events organised around the date, but in a rise of a particular type of marketing, which is irreverent and even anti-Valentine’s Day. Market research company Mintel, for instance, reported last year of possible “gains for retailers who tap into the anti-Valentine’s feeling” and of a rise in “services marketed as alternative Valentine’s gifts”. The fact that companies are now selling some of their products through these means, suggests that “anti-Valentine’s” has become cool, even among couples.

For some, of course, the original drive towards anti-Valentine’s events has come out of the torments of being a single on Valentine’s night, or the scars of being the teenager who never got the Valentine’s card. For the past eight years jazz singer Claire Daly has been putting on an anti-Valentine’s gig in Edinburgh’s Jazz Bar titled Down With Love!

“In 2009 I decided I was fed up with ridiculous casual relationships and I was just not going to even try,” she recalls. That year, when she asked by the jazz bar to do a gig on February 15, she said, “Oh, no, I’ll have to do all this Valentine’s Schmalentine’s stuff.” She was, however, told she wouldn’t have to. She could even, if she liked, do something anti-Valentines.

From that Down With Love! was born. “It’s about,” she says, “not placing too much store on the perfect partner, the perfect love, the perfect romance. Because there’s no such thing. And it’s a celebration of friendship, irreverence, of love in the wider meaning of the word.” It’s also, for her, about “solidarity and companionship and finding your tribe.” Though now a loved-up member of a couple, she continues to perform the gig eight years later.

But, she says, it’s not really anti-love. “Part of me,” she says, “thinks that while anti-Valentine's is a rejection of commercialism, pressure and hype, another part of me thinks that those of us who protest our anti-Valentines’ spirit sometimes doth protest too much. We’d secretly love to be smothered in love and affection but our circumstances make us feel we have to tough it out.”

There is another strand, among these new approaches to the festival, that is really more about friendship than romantic love. Hence the rise of Galentine’s and Palentine’s Day, celebrations which started in the United States but which are gaining popularity here. Many say they were originally inspired by Amy Poehler’s character in Parks And Recreation who declared Galantine’s “Only the best day of the year. Every February 13th my lady friends and I leave our husbands and our boyfriends at home and kick it breakfast style, ladies celebrating ladies.”

Nor is this new Valentine's phenomenon even necessarily about loving others. It can be about loving yourself, treating yourself to a massage, or a glass of fizz in the bath.

To some extent all these alternatives and backlashes to Valentine's Day can be as commercial as the original. Even the idea of loving oneself is something that is easily marketed and turned into a consumer occupation. Testimony to this is the fact that the biggest retail event in the world is Singles Day in China, which began as an anti-Valentine’s day event created by single bachelors. But nevertheless the message is out there, whether extravagantly consumerist or free, Valentine’s is for everyone.