Date Night With Your Bestie & PrettyLittleThing

 Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, and cliche or not, everyone always has some form of an opinion on it. Perhaps you absolutely love heart-shaped chocolate and teddy bears. Or maybe you hate them (how can you hate chocolate? U ok hun?) But my relationship with Valentines Day… Well, let’s just say it’s a little bit complicated. Like any millennial female, I’m not afraid to admit I’ve had my fair share of disasters…

There was the year that a boyfriend told me he’d organise something ‘special’, then got so drunk at a party the night before that he spent the day sleeping off his hangover whilst I watched the box set of Sex and the City that he bought me as my present – which, might I add, he presented to me still in its HMV bag. Ugh.

Then there was the year I was stuck in some remote hotel room somewhere in Birmingham with this guy I was in one of those strange non-committal but kind of committed relationships with, eating fish and chips after helping him do some work-related stuff since 6 in the morning. Zzzzzzz…

And then last year I shared a less-than romantic Mc Donald’s meal with my Uber driver after a night out in Shoreditch. I did that annoying “can you take me home via Mc Donald’s please?!” thing that I sometimes do, and offered to get him something. So we chatted our way through our midnight feasts whilst discussing our weirdest Valentine’s experiences – ironic, huh?

As girls we’re fed by the media and Hollywood and everything around us this ultra shiny, Instagram-perfect idea so that in our pre-teen years we simply dream of having the perfect Valentine’s Day. All the cliche’s galore! A bouquet of red roses is a great place to start, no amount of chocolate in heart-shaped boxes is ever enough and if I don’t get at least one I Love You teddy bear then you’re dumped! Basically. But by the time we are in our late teens and early twenties, there’s been a strange shift where we’re so disillusioned by the whole thing we seem to hate it. “Commercialised and capitalised love! Cliche! Overrated!” we all scream whilst simultaneously rolling our eyes at our boyfriends saying “don’t buy me anything” – only to then get completely furious at them on V Day when they actually don’t get us anything. (Admit it! You’ve so done it too!) We’re in that stage of our lives where we’re playing it cool, being uber nonchalant and blase, because being in love and showing your emotions simply isn’t cool – you loved-up losers!

My theory is this: our falling out of love with the day that celebrates love is partly because the romanticised Valentine’s we always dreamed of set our standards higher than our crappy boyfriends could ever really reach. They hadn’t got a chance! Life isn’t a shiny rom com, and your late teens and early twenties are turbulent times of development when you’re still working out how to really deal with other human beings properly so chances are, somebody is going to mess it up somehow. And just like that, we had our dreams crushed – just a little – by dumb teenage boyfriends (refer back to my opening paragraph for examples…)