Ever since I was little I would watch my mum prepare for Valentine’s Day. She would apply her make up meticulously and ornament her best dress with jewellery. Then, with a splash of her favourite perfume, out she went with my dad for dinner, leaving me with romantic thoughts for my future and a younger brother throwing toys at my head.
As I grew up I was bombarded with images of love struck couples on this divisive day. My single friends scowled at these couples, but I was jealous and in awe.
For them, Valentine’s was a commercialised, inconvenient and pointless holiday. For me it was a day to remind people that you love them. Year by year I eagerly awaited the Valentine’s Day when I would be part of one of those sickeningly soppy couples.
Finally, this year I have managed to keep a boyfriend long enough to reach February 14th. I should be fulfilling a life long dream.
At exactly this moment, I should be planning a romantic meal, picking out a new dress and writing down a sentimental message on a cute card.
However, this year, I will be in Manchester, and my boyfriend will be in Ireland, where I am from. Separated by almost two hundred miles and a poverty-stricken student status, we are unable to celebrate Valentine’s in the way I always imagined.
Instead, I will spend it stuffing my face with cheap heart-shaped chocolates which I bought for myself. At the same time my ‘anti-Valentine’ friends will be gazing starry eyed across a table in a posh restaurant at their boyfriends.
With this thought in mind, I will most likely spend the early hours of the morning on the phone to mine, whinging about how I have been denied a childhood ambition.
This will be followed by more chocolate and glaring jealously at whatever rom-com I decide to watch, in an attempt to live out my romantic expectations through the nauseatingly loved up couples on my television screen, with the hope that next year I will be one of them.
