This is not a post about love

It's St Valentine's Day, so I should be blogging about love, right?

I was going to write a cute little thing about "Love is..." and list a bunch of reasons why I love my boys. But it was coming out sacchariny and contrived, and I wasn't happy with it.

So then I was going to write about how lucky I am, and all the love I have in my life, what with Beloved, my boys, my folks, my family, my friends. I'm truly blessed. But you know that already.

So I thought I'd go the other way, and talk about why I hate Valentine's Day almost as much as I hate New Years, and I think a lot of it goes back to grade school and being unpopular and how much worse it was being unpopular on Valentine's Day than it was being unpopular on any random Tuesday. But that sounded pathetic and like I was fishing for compliments (which I usually have no problem doing) and so I scrapped that, too.

For someone who considers herself a hopeless romantic, I'm having a surprisingly hard time writing about love today.

It's what bothers me the most about Valentine's Day, I think. You feel put on the spot, like you have to produce something unique and special to honour the people you love. But I don't want to be told to do that, or even moreso, have them feel obligated to do that, just because it's February 14. We won't be going out for dinner tonight at an overcrowded restaurant, and Beloved probably won't be sending me flowers. The boys are too young to be making construction-paper hearts at school. And although I've picked up trinkets for each of them, I like to do that for no reason too, so this probably won't seem out of the ordinary.

I don't want them to remember to tell me they love me because of some artificial construct of the greeting card industry, and I don't want this to be the only day we celebrate the love that binds us together.

I don't need chocolate to tell me I'm loved today. I'm a lucky girl - I know it every single day.