Valentine? Oh, that guy. Patron Saint of Hallmark stores and the man single-handedly responsible for the senseless murder of countless innocent roses worldwide.

I don’t get it.

Love.  Sure, fine.  Love is great.  What I don’t get is why we need a specific day to celebrate it.  Shouldn’t it be an everyday thing? Why should I say “I love you” with overpriced chocolates and dying flowers? Why will those same chocolates and flowers be 50% off on February 15th? Does love no longer matter on that day?

What I’d like is a practical girl. A sensible girl. A girl who will appreciate me taking her out to dinner on Wednesday, when we can get free appetizers, instead of Tuesday, when a “Lovers’ Entree” is $39.00.  A girl who thinks ‘dressing up’ is me putting on a T-shirt without holes in it.  A girl who would appreciate a nice quality power tool as a gift, rather than a tiny piece of crystallized carbon some guy found in a hole in South Africa.

Where are the girls who would enjoy staying home tonight, ordering in, and playing a game of grown-up Scrabble, where any word is fair game and a Triple Word Score™ results in some very interesting scoring? How about one who would appreciate a card devoid of kittens, puppies, sparkly hearts, naked babies with primitive projectile weapons, and any other vestiges of this totally overblown “holiday”, and instead expressed love as a mathematical equation, complete with a graph?

Nerdy girls represent!

Sorry if I seem unromantic to many of you. I just don’t see the practicality of “Take her breath away with the diamond of her dreams”.  I’ll sure take her breath away when I tell her I can’t afford to go to the movies again until 2017.  How about an ice cream? How about a nice set of all-season radials?  I’d sure like you to not die in a car wreck – isn’t that love?  Doesn’t that say more than “Here’s some fudge. See, I love you.”??

I’m just confused.  How does promoting hyperglycemia indicate one’s desire for another person?  Does giving them fragrant flowers insinuate that they smell bad?  I’m not exactly the best with social conventions, but these things escape me.  Men get cologne as a gift, which says to me: “I don’t like the way you normally smell, so splash some of this on.”  Why would I want to smell like Calvin Klein anyway?  And frankly, that Old Spice guy scares me.

If I was dating a girl and she didn’t know how I felt about her without the timely application of flowers, chocolates, saccharine-sweet greeting cards, masked teddy bears, or mylar balloons on an arbitrary calendar day, then I’m either doing something terribly wrong on the other 364 days, or I’m with the wrong woman.

Happy February 14th.  Maybe it can serve as a reminder to say what you feel more often, but if it feels like an obligation to buy stuff, I think you might have to re-evaluate your priorities.

Don’t say you love her with flowers.  Give her some flowers, sure, but say it with your mouth.  Say it with your actions.  Do it tomorrow, too.  Mean it.