I should be totally freaking out. Valentine’s Day is fast-approaching and not even my mother has sent me a card. (I’ll probably get cookies in the mail from my 90-year-old grandpa, but there’s no guarantee that he’ll remember to put all of the ingredients in them.)

After the age of nine, you’re not supposed to rely on your family members as your primary source of Valentine’s. But I’m not the only single person in the world, so I know that it does happen sometimes.

 

A couple of years ago—when I was sneakily writing about single activities before I was actually single—I wrote about fun activities for singles in and around town. Now that I’m single, I’m not planning on going to any of them.

 

As fun as some of them sound, it just seems weird to wear a fancy dress to a party to meet perfect strangers in the hopes of finding one that might be right for me. Something just doesn’t compute when I think about it.

 

“Hi! I’d love to hang out with you and have an already overly-commercial day as our anniversary” is probably not the best pick-up line in the history of pick-up lines. Not, of course, that I ever use pick-up lines anyway.

 

Nor could I imagine lying about my age to get into a Valentine’s Day Speed Dating (competition?) as someone suggested. It’s not that I have a hard time talking to people or that snap judgments don’t come to me naturally; it’s just that I can’t imagine that any guy that I would ever like would ever actually do a Speed Dating event. In every picture I see of Speed Dating events, the guys are wearing their standard douchebag Docker uniforms and seem like a bizarre cross between used car salesman and frat guys. Not that there’s much difference between the two.

 

So I’ll probably stay home on Valentine’s Day this year. I might buy myself a couple of candy hearts and then again I might not. If I’m lucky enough to get cookies from my Grandpa, I’ll have to eat them carefully to make sure that he didn’t forget the brown sugar or any other crucial ingredients.

 

If I start to feel sorry for myself too much, which I doubt, I’ll probably start a little art project to make myself feel better. Maybe I’ll make a few broken hearts out of construction paper and tape them back together as best as I can.