Valentine’s Day becomes a Thing (capital T) when you’re in elementary school. A class of chubby-cheeked first graders, barely out of kindergarten, knee-deep in pink silk paper, cardboard and poorly drawn red hearts. The teacher helps you out with the harder parts, glides the scissors through the curved bumps on the hearts, spells out the harder words, crumples together little paper rosettes.

You’ve made cards for all your friends. Your family. You even made one for your teacher, but the surprise is probably ruined since you had to check with them how to spell “teacher”. You ask your friends who else you should make a card for.

Some of your friends have older siblings. They giggle and say that on Valentine’s Day you give cards to people you loooooove.

At home you ask your mom what it means to love someone. She says it means the feeling you get when you really like someone, that your heart feels warm with them, and you want to be close to them. It makes sense, you know that feeling.

You make one more card for a classmate, a boy. You don’t know him that well but he’s nice and when you play together, he makes you smile. When you give him the card he says thank you. People ask you if he’s your boyfriend now.

You say no.

After school you go play at your friends’ house. Her parents give each other Valentine’s Day gifts. They look happy, but your game more interesting. It’s an overture, in a manner of speaking.

 

It gets harder after that, year by year. The meaning of things like hugs and cards and smiles grows exponentially with each year that goes by and it’s always harder for you to understand. Valentine’s Day grows more and more into that Thing and the more it does, the less you like it.

People mostly stop handing out cards to friends or family. It stops being a public thing where the entire class scrambles around to put cards on desks and shove papers into hands. It changes its shape, its form, into heated cheeks and stuttering “here you go!”:s in the hallway, into delighted inhales and soft grins.

You stop giving cards to everyone when it stops being a class activity. When it turns into something else, something you don’t fully grasp but grasp just enough to know it’s not for you.

You still give cards to your closest friends but that’s it. Other people would be crossing the invisible line someone drew. Some people hand out cards, but that’s no longer a standard. It’s an anomaly.

You get a card once. The Different Kind of Card. A card and an awkward question to “hang out”. You don’t know a lot, but you know enough to clue in on the fact that this is a Different (capital D) kind of hanging out, the kind that’s supposed to lead to more than just friendly banter and grins at the coffee shop.

You also know enough to know the person giving you the card doesn’t make you want those things. So, you say no, haltingly, face red. You wonder if it’s supposed to feel this embarrassing, to turn someone down.

At least it only happens once.

That Valentine’s Day you go home on your own like every day. Someone asks if you got any cards, more interested in the process than you were yourself.

 

Growing up feels difficult when you feel like a part of yourself just refuses to develop normally. The only time your heart pounds when talking to someone is when you have to go to the doctor’s office by yourself and you have to ask the receptionist where to go.

It’s fine most of the time. Plenty of people are single, plenty of people aren’t looking for romance, it’s not like you’re a one-in-a-billion anomaly. But it’s hard, sometimes, on days when spotlight is shone onto romance (and honestly, when is it not?). Maybe you’re just not doing the correct things? What other reason is there for not settling in your skin?

Adults don’t hand out Valentine’s Day cards, even to their friends.

It stops being about people you love and it’s all about The One You Love, the one person you get to love in a way that’s profoundly different from anyone else, a burning, fluttery, romantic kind of love people fall over themselves to portray in a way that captures exactly how sacrosanct and world-rocking it is.

You close your eyes and wait for it to wash over you as well one day.

You’d meet a stranger one day, make eye contact across the room.

You’d run into an old acquaintance, now more mature and refined and something bubbles up in your chest.

You’d look at your friend anew one day and your entire world tilts off its axis.

It doesn’t come. You meet people, friends, old and new, you look, and you talk, and you smile, and you squeeze your eyes shut at night and wait for it to hit you like some holy revelation.

It doesn’t. After a while, you start thinking that it never will.

But it needs to, right?

Because some people don’t want romance but surely that’s not you. You’re just an ordinary person and aren’t ordinary people supposed to fall in love? Have a base level of loving comfort in their lives that’s somehow so different and better than your friend’s hand on your shoulder, your mother’s arms around you, you siblings’ pats on the head?

 

People you know start falling in love. It takes some adjustment to understand it. How people can be so wrapped around in each other, capable of ignoring everyone else. You’re jealous, but not for the usual reasons. You miss your friends, as greedy as it sounds. You’re jealous that they get to feel something so amazing while you struggle to understand it, your chest hollow where romance should lie.

You don’t want their life, but you want to feel the thing they do.

They’re so happy, all of them, and you begin to understand romance. Maybe not for yourself, but slowly an idea of it starts growing in your brain, a kind, soft idea. Something that’s still intangible, a formless idea. But you like it because you see how happy people are with it.

But why can’t you feel it?

Another Valentine’s Day passes and this time it fills you with a cold fear, a panic that this is it, this is all life is going to be for you, an endless litany of questions and missing out.

 

You go through the usual steps for this kind of thing:

Maybe you’re just not into anyone you know (Try actually talking to people instead of being awkward)

Maybe you have a really specific type? (Maybe you have unreasonable standards?)

Are…are you gay? (You never knew how to talk to the opposite sex, anyways)

Maybe you should date around, see what feels right? (At least act normal if you can’t feel normal)

In the end they just make a sound and tell you that you probably just haven’t met the right person yet.

(You’re starting to become sure there’s no such person out there)

Valentine’s Day makes you feel hollow, embarrassed because you should feel incomplete on such a day, but you don’t.

 

You try on different faces to pass the time. You’re studious, shy, edgy, composed, distant, friendly, you try going places, talking to people, joining organisations, starting hobbies. Maybe one of the faces would somehow unlock the feelings you can’t find.

You find a lot of things, but not romance.

You wonder if you were even looking, whoops, forgot all about it. Too busy to remember.

Another Valentine’s Day passes. You go home, alone.

You feel like you’ve failed in a game you never wanted to take part in, but your name was written down regardless.

You’re Alice in the Caucus Race, dropped into a world you don’t understand and forced to run in circles without any sense of what’s happening. All you know is that you’re supposed to run but it makes no sense because you never wanted to and had no need for it.

 

You have your problems, who doesn’t?

You live with them, because that’s what people do.

One day someone asks you to write your problems down. Get them out of your head and into actual words. Solvable puzzles. Quantified and plain.

And you don’t write down being single or not being attracted to people or not wanting a relationship. Instead, you fill the paper with things like stress and sleeping problems and other things you have to wrestle with in everyday life.

It only hits you when you go home.

You didn’t write it down onto the paper.

 

You have your problems (we all do), but maybe this isn’t one of them.

Maybe this isn’t a problem at all.

It’s a strange thought for you, since it’s always felt like you need to treat it as a problem, that it might not be one after all.

You’re not the most forgiving person to yourself but maybe this isn’t something you need to be forgiven for?

Maybe that spot that you thought was hollowed out for romance isn’t hollow at all. Maybe it’s filled with other things. Other feelings, other kinds of love and affection and adoration? Other reasons to be warmed by someone’s presence.

Maybe you’re allowed to enjoy romance without feeling it yourself? Perhaps you don’t like romantic love because you crave it for yourself, but maybe because it’s a lovely and kind thing that makes people happy and you like that.

Maybe you’re allowed to just exist and love on your own terms.

Another Valentine’s Day passes and you’re as single as they come.

And yeah, why not?