Happy Valentine’s Day to the lonely girls and the lonely girls ONLY
If you’re in love that’s great but not everything is for you.
Valentine’s Day, like a lot of holidays, at its core is a dumb holiday that corporations made up to get you to spend money and feel bad. Unfortunately, it gets my ass every year. As a perpetually single person, this holiday always feels a little bit bitter. Sure, if I did have a partner I wouldn’t do anything that spectacular but it’s the principle of the thing, you know?
For the sake of honesty, I will confess that I did spend Valentine’s Day with a person, once. It was last year with a weird guy I was kind of seeing at the time. I made him watch Bee Movie and he asked me to bring one of those Reese’s hearts. I thought we were going to, like, cut it up and share but no, he just started biting into it and ate the whole thing in front of me. This was not fun. Needless to say, I feel like this shouldn’t count as a real Valentine’s Day, so I’m not going to count it as a real Valentine’s Day, which means I’ve still spent every February 14th alone.
A more important holiday I just discovered is February 6th: the day where guys break up with people they were seeing in semi-new relationships so they can avoid doing anything for Valentine’s Day. Does this sound like something oddly specific that happened to me specifically this year? Yes, but this also happened to one of my friends on the same day this year so I can see this is a common occurrence.
After 28 years of not knowing what it’s like to be loved (in a romantic way. Friends, you can get off my ass because we are not kissing each other on the mouth!!), I wonder if this whole love game is just not for me. I’m not super hot, I’m annoying as fuck but also extremely quiet, and I’m both a late bloomer and have experienced horrors beyond your comprehension. What can I say? I’m complicated. So complicated that dating me is a burden (so I’m told). During this journey of being alone I’ve done what you’re supposed to do—focus on the love of friends and family, and boy do I have a lot of those. And with the power of all my friendships, I’ve kind of become the Valentine’s queen.
For single girlies, we already have Galentine’s Day, the holiday that Amy Poehler created on Parks and Rec over ten years ago. The concept changed the game. You can celebrate your friendships the day before the love day (not on the love day, obviously, because true love is still for romantic partners and nothing else!) because friendships are beautiful (but not as beautiful as getting laid with someone who finds you sexy, which nobody does because you’re alone on Valentine’s Day). What I do is that, but also something else entirely.
(I’ve already written about this last year, but I do this thing where I eat a lot of Thai curry and then eat a pie straight from the container. This is me at my most primal, and if you can’t handle me at Bring Your Own Pie day, you don’t deserve me when I’m not eating a pie straight from the container.)
Since 2021, when we were still cooped up inside, I thought it would be kind of fun to send my friends one of those Spongebob valentines we would get as kids from our classmates. It is childish, stupid, and most importantly it was fairly low-effort but has enough impact to say, “Hey you’re my friend and I’m thinking about you!” Also these valentines came with tattoos, which is very fun. They were a hit, so I decided to do it again the next year and again this year.
The beautiful problem with Operation Valentine is that, being a single person I am inclined to meet a lot of people throughout the rest of the year in hopes that I can cultivate more friendships to fill my lonely void (and relieve current friends of having to see me too often), and also in the hopes that one of those people would like to make out with my face (they don’t), or have a friend they could introduce me to who wants to make out with my face (they never do). Because of this, the address list gets bigger and bigger. People are in committed partnerships and if I’ve met said partner even once I feel inclined to also give them a valentine so they don’t feel left out. This year’s valentines totaled to around 90 cards. Things are going out of control. But also, I have been getting some valentines in the mail myself as a return gift and who doesn’t love mail covered in stickers?
This isn’t the first time I’ve done something like this. In high school I hand-sewed gingerbread man plushies and snowflake plushies and gave them away as presents to literally anyone who had spoken to me in the time I was a Batavia High School student. I love to overexert myself to give little handmade knicknacks to people—a trait I’ve inherited from my mom, who also did this kind of thing but on a smaller scale. Too much time not getting kissed on the mouth can make a person do crazy things.
Also, don’t ask me about the M&M commercial I didn’t see it!