It was the witching hour. I sat alone at a desk in my room, lightly bathed in the glow of my computer screen, speaking in hushed whispers through my microphone to reach a single person 23 days away while trying to avoid waking up the people in the next room. In this tiny bedroom, cramped with other people’s things, in the dead of night, hidden from judgmental eyes, I made the first genuine smile I’d had in a long time. Under the cool light of the crescent moon and the soft confetti of midwinter snow, I began the happiest Valentine’s Day I’ve ever had. I am aroace– aromantic and asexual. I don’t experience romantic or sexual attraction towards other people. This has made Valentine’s Day a surreal experience for me. Naturally, a holiday centered around romance and relationships has little emotional meaning for someone who can’t feel those attractions, but the same could be said for other American holidays.
Columbus Day and President’s Day never held a place in my heart either, outside of the reprieve they once offered back when I was in public school. Valentine’s Day has always been different, because of the culture surrounding it. I could ignore the people who fought tooth and nail to retain Columbus Day’s name before it was inevitably changed to the far superior Indigenous People’s Day. I could ignore the three people in the U.S. who actually gave a damn about President’s Day. It was not so easy to ignore the constant, crushing judgment surrounding Valentine’s Day. The scrutiny aimed at everyone, young or old, single or in a relationship.
Everyone had a Valentine. You’ve got to have one, right? We know you’re single, but there must be someone you’re pining for. There’s no possible way you have no one in the world you’re willing to shell out money to buy cheap candy and a mass-produced card with sappy nonsense for. Don’t be silly, it’s impossible to not have someone. Wait, you’re serious? Aww, that’s so sad! Are they taken? No? You really just have no one you’re lusting after? Not even a little crush? You must be so lonely, you poor thing! You’re young, you have plenty of time! Get out and meet new people! You might find yourself liking someone! Wait, you… have friends? Now you have to be joking. There’s no way you’re single, have friends, and don’t fantasize at night about having one of them bend you over the kitchen table and rail you until you can’t breathe. Not unless you’re just incapable of love, you heartless monster. And the worst part is, this expectation was enforced in school, on children. As early as second grade, I remember being assigned a little lollipop and a heart-shaped card. I remember being ordered by my teachers: “Give this to the boy in class you love most, he will be your
Valentine.” It was in the mid-2000s and I wasn’t even eight years old. The concept of alternative romantic orientations, aromanticism, and the implications of enforcing romance on children weren’t things I was able to understand at the time. All I knew was that I was given the order, and I always drew a blank. The boy in class I love most, what could that mean? I didn’t love any of these people. Not even the ones I talked to at the lunch table– I enjoyed their company, I would be sad if they were gone, but love? Not even close. There’s only one person I loved in that school, and not like that. That would be icky. But I couldn’t just… not have a Valentine. I’d get in trouble with the teachers if I flatly refused to do something they told us to do, something that everyone else seemed to be able to do just fine. If I was the only one who had trouble with this, did that mean something was wrong with me?
Throughout my time in elementary school, there was one boy I consistently gave my assigned Valentine’s Day cards to. This boy was a friend of mine, who understood my issue as well as an elementary school kid could explain it without knowing the name. A friend who had a crush on someone else, who brought more elaborate Valentine’s Day gifts from home for that girl. A friend who knew, because I made absolutely sure he knew, this handed down lollipop and crappy mass-produced card meant nothing. In 5th grade we made a joke of the whole thing, writing just the number of our latest math test score on the card because we were long past the formality of pretending that these Valentine’s Day cards mattered to either of us. He did better than me, he got a 98 while I got a 94.
As I grew up, I was no longer directly ordered by the adults in my life to perpetuate the commercialist holiday that pretended to be about love, but the underlying expectation of romance grew stronger than ever. I’ve had many bad experiences with people who were under the impression that, because I was single, I would necessarily be romantically– and sexually– available. I’ve had many experiences dealing with what seems to be the standard fare for my social circle: multiple times a guy has approached me with a romantic proposition, I refused because I felt no attraction to him, and he took it extremely personally, even getting angry because I dared not love him the way he does. Some of these suitors were people I believed to be good friends of mine, people who were willing to risk our existing, valuable relationship to pursue a romance they knew I didn’t want. One of them physically assaulted me. Regardless of sexual orientation, most girls I’ve known have experienced this, and Valentine’s Day only ramped up the tension.
So by the time I’d hit my twenties, I was emotionally done with Valentine’s Day. I was fed up with this stupid holiday. I hated the fact that society expected me to shell out money I definitely didn’t have on a random day of the year to a bunch of faceless corporations that didn’t care about me or any of the people who were judging me for not wanting to do it. I was tired of the world’s obsession with romance and sex, and the incessant badgering to find a romantic partner because that was somehow the only way to achieve emotional fulfillment in life, and the only paths forward were finding someone to tie myself to or dying a miserable, lonely death.
And most of all, I was tired of being persistently reminded of all of these things every single year. 2021 began just like any other year for me. I was dreading February and I was dreading Valentine’s Day. But there were other things on my mind besides the holiday, things that made another reminder of society’s expectations feel welcome in comparison. Throughout late 2020 and early 2021, I had started developing more of a social circle online. I’d been playing video games with some online friends, talking to them about what was going on at school and in my personal life, and forming good memories.
However, there was one member of our group who was growing to be more and more of a problem. For the sake of his privacy, I’ll call this person “E”. E had been part of the group longer than I had, but he was rather toxic to us all and I was taking the brunt of the toxicity. E would come into my DMs at random times to make me play therapist with his personal problems, things that I thought were TMI for an online friend but also naively considered too serious to just let go. E held a grudge against another friend of mine who wasn’t part of the group, and would openly express jealousy when I spent time with that friend. He had severe abandonment issues, and passively mentioned several times that losing one of us would make E feel like his life was ruined, or would lead him to start hurting himself. Our entire friend group found ourselves walking on eggshells around this boy, and I was facing the worst of it.
By February of 2021, I knew I didn’t want to be friends with E anymore. Our relationship had grown too toxic. My friends and I were all struggling to figure out how to extract E from my social circle without causing lasting damage to anyone involved. At the time, I remember asking my friends, “Is this what it's like to break up with someone? This feels like a breakup, and a messy one.” This malignant tumor of social drama formed the backdrop of my life in the early months of 2021, and the connections to the looming holiday ahead were not lost on me.
At midnight one Sunday morning, I received a DM from another friend of mine. This friend, who I will call “HG”, was one of the people in my main friend group. HG had been affected by E’s toxicity almost as much as I had, and he was helping me work through the drama the whole time. HG also happened to have feelings for me. He knew about my orientation, he knew that I don’t feel that way about him, but the added layer still made our friendship more complicated. In every interaction with HG, insecurity borne from years of trauma bubbled to the surface. I thought, “Should I be worried when HG shows signs of jealousy, or comments offhandedly about the idea of the two of us being more than friends? When he says nice things about me, is it just an attempt at courtship, a way to buy my affections? Does HG actually care about me, as a friend? Or is he just another suitor, engaging in this charade of a friendship as a means to pursue me?” I opened the DM with trepidation, not sure what to expect.
He wanted to play Minecraft. There were no strings attached to the offer. Even though it was late at night, HG and I hopped on a little private server where we had been working on building a castle for several weeks by this point. We played for hours. We collected more cobblestone than most normal players had any reason to gather. We pored over reference images to find inspiration for what our castle was going to look like. HG even drew a schematic of the final design we settled on. All the while, we chatted away about things that didn’t really matter while I tried to keep quiet enough to avoid waking up my parents in the next room.
All of my worries melted away. It was the witching hour in the middle of winter, and I was spending it playing a video game with my friend. As fatigue took hold on us both, HG and I agreed that we should probably go to bed. HG gave me a white virtual flower in the game, and then logged off without another word. I checked my inventory and saw that he had used a rare special item to inscribe a message within the gift. “Happy Valentine's Day.” It was at that moment that I checked the calendar on the top-right corner of my computer screen. For the first time since second grade, I had managed to forget that it was February 14th.