Monday 14 February 2011

St Valentine's Way...

It comes around once a year, kind of sneaking up unknowingly as it does. It’s in the shops, it’s all over TV. It’s not Halloween, it’s not Christmas…it’s not even my birthday.
 And in case the title and the very date today didn’t give it away- it is in fact, Valentine’s Day.
I am sure that many columns and blogs will be written about this today. Some will be for the day of love- outpouring the warm, cosy feeling that comes with knowing you are happily taken. But there will definitely be many against it- most likely the emotionally-void-spinster-type and the proud owner of multiple cats.
I’m sorry, but I am feeling I might fall under the latter.
It’s just that, for some reason Valentine’s Day has always had this way of either depressing me or intimidating me- mostly because I didn’t get over my fear of boys until I was about  16.
My first experience of Valentine’s Day came in the form of a handmade card from a boy in my class at primary school. It was clad in way too much glitter and tissue paper and was delivered by his best friend.  But more amusingly, it declared his infinite love for me at the tender age of 9 years old.
While that seems like a sweet and innocent gesture now, at the time it left me so scared of him I genuinely couldn’t look him in the eye again.
Secondary school was not really any better. The charities’ committee at school used to set up this Valentine’s event where you could send a plastic rose to the person you liked, along with a message about your general life feelings towards them. It meant that the morning of every February the 14th was the most tense of your entire school year. You knew that if those charities’ committee members came to your classroom and delivered roses to everyone but you, it was- officially- the end of your life.
I would like to say that now, several years on -with all those petty teenage insecurities in the past- that things are different. I’d like to say the dreaded 14th of Feb doesn’t intimidate me anymore. But with the unique smugness that only Valentine’s Day can have against a single girl, this just isn’t true.
Being a mere 19 years of age, I should be content with being single- the world is my oyster and there’s plenty of fish in the sea and all of that. So, why is it that St Valentine’s just has this horrific way of hitting me a big smug smack in the face?
I don’t know if it is the endless TV adverts and soppy music that get to me- or the plastic roses or the ridiculously over-glittered cards. All I know is that St Valentine has some sort of way or depressing and demeaning the single amongst us every year- when all we really want is to be left alone in our emotional void with our numerous cats.

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