I haven’t enjoyed Valentine’s Day since I was 10 years old

The month of love has officially arrived and Valentine’s Day is less than a week away. Yesterday, I told my boyfriend that he will have to ask me to be his Valentine, and that it’s not necessarily a given that I will say yes.

“I will have lots of options, you see,” I told him.

I warned him that there would be a multitude of men blowing up my DMs with heartfelt declarations of love and admiration.

“Who am I to dismiss their efforts? In fact, should I gather all of my eligible bachelors and arrange a joust where they can fight you for my love? Whoever wins, I will crown as my Valentine.”

He ignored me, so I continued to taunt him.

“They even write me poems sometimes.”

“That’s nice for you,” he replied calmly.

Ugh! I am always trying to make him jealous and it never bloody works. My lad is a straight up and down sort of man and this is why we work: there simply isn’t space for two manically romantic, love-obsessed, melodramatic, overbearing, chaotic mental cases in the relationship. So I play that part, and he plays the part of my calming ox.

We won’t physically be together on 14 February, but I don’t actually care. The above might lead you to assume I am lying, but I’m not. Not because I am a cool, laid-back, relaxed, low-maintenance, pick-me girlfriend. Believe me, I am none of those things (I’m about as high-maintenance as it gets), but Valentine’s Day just doesn’t do it for me, it’s a load of PR bollocks.

I do love love. But I love proper, authentic, gutsy, at times gruelling love. I don’t like shiny, showy-offy, superficial, superior, rom-com, commercial love. Valentine’s Day is like a birthday, it’s usually an anti-climax—especially as you get older. Still, the world makes you feel as though you should spend the day in a state of euphoria. The expectation is simply too high, so that no ribbon-wrapped gift could ever be good enough, no showering of affection or candlelit dinner will ever satisfy, because the bar is set at make-believe.

Looking back, I have only ever truly enjoyed one Valentine’s Day. I was in fifth grade and had a crush on a boy called Josh Kilder. When the big day rolled around, the hours passed excruciatingly slowly. The other girls in my class had been presented with plastic bracelets and chocolate bars from their crushes, but Josh was yet to even offer me a smile. I was deeply upset. But at the end of the day, when I went to collect my homework bag I noticed something poking out of the top. It was an envelope with a lopsided heart drawn on it in red felt tip. It was so wonky and smudged, I knew it could only have been drawn by a boy. My heart was beating a mile a minute. I ripped the envelope open with all the urgency of a soldier’s wife who’s endured six months of no correspondence: