Preventing Valentine’s Resentment

James Edmonds | Staff Writer

It’s that time of year. Ads on the side of my browser are telling me that my (nonexistent) wife would love flowers from ProFlowers. The checkout section of Walmart is a sickening combination of pink and red, and also displaying teddy bears larger than their shopping carts. Campus sponsored date events are going on, and everyone seems to be paired up on Chancellor’s. To everyone who is paired up: I sincerely hope you have a fantastic Valentine’s. To everyone who is not: Here is a list of things to do this Valentine’s to keep your negative emotions in check.

– Go out to dinner with a close friend. Once there you can do any number of things. You can pretend to be a couple enjoying a romantic Valentine’s dinner. You can speak loudly about how Valentine’s Day is really Anti-Independence Day and then glare at the couples around you. Or, you can just enjoy the company of the friend you are out with. The important thing is that you have fun.

– Buy a ton of Valentine’s cards just like you did in your elementary school days and pass them out to friends, roommates, classmates, professors, and everyone you see looking dejected on campus. Do be careful when selecting your cards though, they say a lot about your personality. In elementary school I favored the WWE cards, but currently I think I’d be a Spongebob kind of guy.

– Use the loneliness and the anguish as motivation to go work out. There are two good ways to do this: You can tell yourself that once you have the body of Daniel Craig/Katy Perry you won’t have to endure being single any more, or you can instead go work out to take pride in how self-sufficient you are. You don’t even want a significant other! They’d probably just get in the way of your self-sufficient routine.

– Order a giant bouquet of flowers for yourself from “A Secret Admirer.” Carry them around for everyone to see. Bonus points if you accost classmates to tell them you know it was him/her who sent you the flowers.

– Treat it like any other day. Ignore any happy couples you see, and go about your day as if it were any other Tuesday. This may be a less exciting choice, but it’s hard to deny the effectiveness and practicality of this route.

If none of these options seem possible, you can always fall back on the classic.

– Watch romance movies (I recommend “Enchanted”) and eat a ton of junk food.