Here’s What The Nation Really Wants To Say On Valentine’s Day

Much to the relief of awkward Brits as February 14th fast approaches, there are thousands of Valentine’s Day cards out there that will do the talking for you.

For the most part, these cards will do just the trick. Whether you’re looking to schmooze a crush or tell your long-standing partner just how great they are, a card can do the talking if you’re not good with words.

Often most will find the perfect message that they’re looking for in the end, even if the search for it is fairly niche. However, sometimes there’ll be some requests that are just too specific, too particular and that reveal a bit more than you may think about the UK and their feelings…

In our quest to find exactly what the UK wants to say to that lucky someone this year, we’ve done some digging.

We’ve analysed our internal site search data for 2021 (searches through that bar at the top of your screen), looking at the final two weeks of January vs the first two weeks of February to establish the change in searches to find exactly what you’ve all been searching for and here are the results:

Here’s the top changes through our own website search – Jan (18-31) vs Feb (01-14):

It’s important to note that all of these searches would have been made in January and then increased in February – so likely those with love on the brain ahead of Valentine’s Day had something to do with this! 

Some recipients or givers may be more furry than our average customer though, with Valentine’s cards to and from pets seeing a combined increase by up to 5,100% between the last two weeks of January and the first two of February.

The British public aren’t shy about divulging their needs and desires and it seems Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to share them with your partner. Our particular favourites in terms of spikes include ‘dishwasher’ for all those in the relationship that are designated pot washers, and ‘Chris Whitty’, perhaps down to him being the man of the moment for the past two years appearing on our screens, almost daily.

Our analysis also revealed some searches completely unique to the February Valentine’s period, none of these were searched for in January like those above and were so specific we just had to include them:

A shout out to the couples not wanting to forget where the love blossomed and commiserations to those getting a card that includes ‘I liked you’, ‘I still love you’ or ‘I hate you’ – come on, where’s the love guys?

Good luck to the ‘red panties’ and if you’re receiving a voucher, congratulations…!

We’re not here to shame though, keep on searching and telling your loved ones exactly what you think. Life’s too short for secrets! You can even find personalised cards on our site where you can see exactly what you want this Valentine’s Day.

Methodology: For the first section, we omitted all searches where volume decreased in Feb vs Jan, anything related to other life events e.g. birthdays, anniversaries, new baby etc. We then removed all occurrences of standard searches that are expected to peak ahead of Valentine’s Day, e.g ‘Valentine’s Cards’, ‘Valentine’s Day’. With the leftover searches, we searched through for phrases that spiked considerably with no logic or that related to relationships.