If you know me, you know I’ve been single every Valentine’s Day of my life. The rituals have always been the same: waiting for the inevitable post-holiday chocolate sales on February 15, and, before college, sitting down to family dinners with really good ravioli. Those nights were warm and familiar, but they existed parallel to the world Valentine’s Day seemed designed for. While couples exchanged gifts and posted photos, I carried on with my life, slightly to the side of whatever was supposed to be happening.
For years, I’ve insisted that I don’t care about Valentine’s Day. That it’s commercial, overrated and ultimately meaningless. That explanation was convenient and partly true. But it wasn’t the full story. The truth is, I don’t hate the idea of love, and I’m not resentful toward people who celebrate it. What I dislike is how Valentine’s Day has come to define love in such a narrow, performative way. It’s no longer just about affection or connection, it’s a public display of romantic success. Relationships are showcased, compared and evaluated. There’s an implicit hierarchy to it all, and if you’re single, it often feels like you’ve been placed outside the frame.
Being single on Valentine’s Day comes with a strange kind of social silence. No one explicitly says you’re lacking, but the message lingers in the background. There’s pity disguised as reassurance, jokes meant to soften the moment and the assumption that this phase is something to outgrow. It suggests that love is legitimate only when it’s romantic, visible and shared between two people in a specific way. Anything else feels secondary, as though it’s just a placeholder until something better arrives.
That’s where the conversation around self-love often enters, and it’s usually oversimplified. Loving yourself doesn’t mean believing you don’t need anyone or convincing yourself that loneliness is a personal failure you’ve transcended. It doesn’t mean pretending you’re perfectly fulfilled in isolation. Self-love is knowing that your worth isn’t conditional, that it doesn’t get put on hold until someone else validates it. It’s being able to sit with yourself, even on days that feel heavier, and not treat your own presence as insufficient.
There’s also a practical side to it that rarely gets talked about. If you don’t know how to care for yourself, it’s incredibly easy to confuse attachment with love. Without self-respect, love turns into tolerance. Without self-trust, it becomes dependence. Valentine’s Day celebrates big gestures and heightened emotion, but healthy love is built on stability, consistency and mutual respect. It’s not proven through flowers or reservations; it’s sustained through everyday choices. Those are things you have to practice internally before you can offer them to someone else.
Over time, I’ve realized that avoiding Valentine’s Day altogether hasn’t actually protected me from any of these feelings. Ignoring it didn’t make me more secure, it just made the day heavier in a different way. Treating it as something to endure or dismiss gave it more power than I wanted to admit. At some point, that strategy stopped working.
Reframing Valentine’s Day as a single person has become less about celebration and more about agency. It’s choosing to engage with the day on my own terms instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. That might mean doing something small but intentional, like buying myself something thoughtful or setting aside time for reflection. It might mean reaching out to friends or acknowledging the people who consistently show up for me, the ones who already make my life feel full in ways that don’t translate neatly into a holiday narrative. It’s not about forcing positivity or pretending the day suddenly matters. It’s about deciding that I matter, regardless of what the calendar says.
I still don’t love Valentine’s Day, and I doubt I ever will. It will probably always feel a little awkward, a little misaligned with how I experience love. But I’ve learned that rejecting it entirely isn’t the same as being indifferent. Celebrating it imperfectly and without apology has taught me that love isn’t something that begins when someone else arrives. It’s something that’s already present, shaped by how you treat yourself and the people you care about long before romance enters the picture.
So yes, this is my twentieth Valentine’s Day single. That number used to feel heavy, like evidence of something missing. Now it feels more neutral, almost factual. The day isn’t empty just because it looks different than expected. It simply tells a story that doesn’t follow the traditional script. And for the first time, that truth feels steady enough to sit with, and honest enough to write about.