It’s that time of the year again…the time when the stores are full of pink and red candies, heart-shaped balloons, and musical greeting cards (well, except where I live). The time of the year when single girls everywhere eat too much chocolate and wish they had boyfriends to treat them special on Valentine’s Day. For most of my life, I was one of those girls, perennially single, frequently bitter, and increasingly pessimistic about my love life. Even the year I actually had a boyfriend on V-Day, we had dinner with friends, not at some fancy restaurant alone.
For this reason, February 14th was always Singles’ Awareness Day for me, never a day of romance and love. In middle school, I wore my cutest glittery sweater on the day of our Valentine’s Day social, hoping to get asked to dance, but I never was. In college, I remember making homemade valentines with Snow Whore and attending the Vagina Monologues with friends, celebrating our singleness as best we could. Then, when I finally started dating my husband, he was inconveniently living abroad, so Valentine’s Day was celebrated with a Skype date not much different from any other daily chat we had. And, then, last year, I worked the evening shift at the tutoring center, listening to the V-Day drama of my students. On all these V-Days that passed me by, a dose of girl-time and a box of chocolates for myself was enough to keep me reasonably content, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t wishing for more.
And now, I am married, and the rules of the game have surely changed. What do married people do on Valentine’s Day? Share a bottle of wine at a nice restaurant? Write each other poetry? Buy each other frivolous gifts? I feel like I have finally arrived at a place I have been trying to reach for years, only to find that it’s a bit of a let-down.
To be honest, February 14th just makes me miss my friends. I feel utterly unmotivated to display my love for my valentine in any grandiose way. All the cute crafts on Pinterest require supplies I don’t have, and going out to a Valentine’s dinner just isn’t the same when you’re wearing a black abaya instead of a little black dress. In fact, I have half a mind to take after some friends of mine who refuse to acknowledge V-Day at all.
Has our romance died after only 10 months of marriage? I don’t think so…last weekend we had sex three times, and we rack up quite the bill with our daily cutesy texts. But maybe I just need another year to let my inner melancholy single out before I can show V-Day some love.