Valentine’s Day has always irritated me. In elementary school, it was because my classmates would call it “Valentime Day”, and teachers would force us to give candy and chocolate to everyone, not just our friends. In middle school, the thought of my fellow 11-year-old classmates showing affection made me feel dizzy.

Come to think of it, romantic love has always baffled me. I never understood why people want to fall in love so badly. My friends write fan fiction about falling in love with anime characters and dream about having fairy tale romances with K-pop stars, I don’t get it. I know that that sort of thing is never going to happen.

Despite my suspicion, everyone seems to have a crush. One of my friends has a thing for (fictional) Japanese guys, and another one created a separate social media account for the sole purpose of cyber-stalking her crush. I do not understand the point of having such intense affection for another person, especially when at our age, love involves giggling hysterically and smacking each other when a person of romantic interest is in the vicinity. Crushes like this will eventually go away, or the relationship won’t work out.

Naturally, as a socially awkward 14-year-old, I couldn’t possibly know what romantic love is, so my skepticism was expected.

I could attempt to explain what I think love is, based on all of the Hallmark movies my mom has made me suffer through. Love is finding someone the week before Christmas, deciding that they are troublesome, being forced to spend time with them, and getting together for a montage with highly disturbing holiday music. Then, there’s an “unexpected” wrinkle, and the main characters split up, only to discover that they can’t live without each other. They run through the airport to meet each other, they kiss in public and everyone claps, and for a reason that I’ve never known, the girl lifts her foot in some gesture resembling the flamingo stretch. But that’s just in Hallmark movies.

Like the strange flamingo movement, I never understood the great need to have a relationship. Even starting in elementary school it was always, “Now that we’re in middle school, we can have relationships!”, “Now that we’re in fifth grade, we can have boyfriends!”, or even “Now that we know boys, we can make out in the hallways!”. Someone watched too much High School Musical in kindergarten.

Likewise, I think people are in love with the idea of love, the idea that someone is going to come and sweep them off of their feet, and by magic, they are going to have some sort of fantasy love story with highly disturbing holiday music and kissing in the airport. I really hate to be such a devout realist, but I believe that while romantic affection for other people is only natural, love is only for the purpose of continuing the population, for lack of a better term.

So, on Valentine’s Day, while other people are buying overpriced flowers and chocolate for their significant others, I will be buying chocolate for myself and editing grammatical errors in my friend’s scandalous fan fiction. Understanding “love” is not a task for me.

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