A Different Kind of Valentine

By: Megan Waddington 

It’s February, which means for some there’s a fondness for the frills of Valentine’s Day and for others it’s a day that can pass like any other. Shop windows blur into a wash of reds and pinks as I walk past, telling myself it doesn’t bother me. Still, it does.

Roses, hearts, and cliché cards line the streets like rehearsed declarations of love, neatly wrapped reminders of something we’re ‘missing’ or ‘wishing’ for. I remind myself not to let it get to me. I keep my pace steady, my mind busy, and my attention fixed anywhere but there.

There’s something so quietly exhausting and emotionally agonising about pretending to be indifferent about such a loud day. Even when I’m not looking, the reminder slaps me in my face when I’m feeling down because, apparently, Valentine's Day has comedic timing this year. The day always makes itself known on the street, online, in conversations I didn’t ask to overhear. It doesn’t demand attention; it assumes it.

The truth is, behind the pretty pink hues and flower bouquets, it’s just a day dressed up to feel heavier than it is. 

And yet, knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. If anything, it leaves me sitting with a quieter question: if it’s just a day, why does it still feel heavy? Why does it feel like a reminder? 

Maybe it’s because I’m not just staring at Valentine’s Day marked on the calendar. I’m staring at all the other possibilities, I think I should be living too.

I think about all the things I want to do for myself: solo dates to places I’ve longed to visit, long walks, pages of books in my room untouched, and coffee in places I’ve bookmarked but never visited. A life full of small, intentional moments waiting to be lived. The possibilities branch endlessly in front of me, each one meaningful, each one valid until the abundance itself becomes paralysing.

If anything, it leaves me thinking about an overwhelming, familiar Substack piece I read recently, ‘I want to do everything, so I do nothing’. Lusia’s post directly references Sylvia Plath in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, which sits heavily with me almost constantly. 

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

https://substack.com/home/post/p-142837810 

I try to name this horrible feeling of wanting to do everything so badly, live so many different lives, see places, people, art and films, yet the overwhelming dedication of actually choosing where to start leaves me stumped. Even picking a film from my cluttered watchlist leaves me crawling back to YouTube or a series I’ve watched 10 times over.  So, I wonder if Valentine’s Day isn’t really about romance at all, but about confrontation, a quiet reminder of all the ways I could be spending my time, instead of getting lost in overthinking or the person I will miss, dating again, and of that lingering fear that I’m somehow falling behind, when maybe this day is asking me to turn inward and listen to what I truly want.

I want to be so many things and meet so many versions of myself, yet my mind stays cluttered. To clear it, I slowly want to worry less about how I’m perceived and more about how the yearning that floods and overfills my head, to do so many things, will take me to the places I’ve always wanted to be and go.

Since leaving my long-term relationship at the beginning of last year, I’ve realised that I’ve never truly been alone in my adult life, alone in the sense of having no one to message, no dates on the horizon, no emotional placeholder.

There was always someone: a crush, a “what if,” a person onto whom I could project possibility. Some of those connections were meaningful, some ended in quiet disappointment, and others in complete car crashes. If I’m truly honest with myself all of them, except for my last relationship, which I admire fondly, were distractions, places to project my yearning. 

And the truth I’m only now sitting with is that the yearning itself wasn’t always for another person, but for my own desires: for the many things I want to do, explore, and become.

This became eerily apparent to me the other week, sitting in my best friend’s car as I vented about losing someone I’d fallen for. I cried while she listened, then she said quietly, “Megan, maybe you have to be alone.”

In my teary state, I joked that in the next few months, I might message someone from my past, someone who had treated me badly, almost as a form of retaliation against how much I was hurting. She looked at me and said, “You’re only doing that because it’s scared to be alone.” That sentence was the pinch that woke me up. I realised how absurd it was to want to self-sabotage like that. Why would I willingly return to something that hurt me just to avoid sitting with myself?

I had been replacing the discomfort of being alone with noise: worrying about who might text me, replaying old conversations, imagining new ones that didn’t exist yet. Anything to avoid being present with myself. And in that moment, I understood that the fear wasn’t loneliness itself, it was the stillness that comes with it, and what it might force me to confront.

The idea of sitting alone in a restaurant, wandering through a museum without anyone to lean toward, ordering for one, or slipping into a cinema seat by myself without anyone to exchange feelings of what we just watched felt exposing. When I knew I was going alone, I would take forever getting ready, lingering in the mirror, changing outfits for the fifth time, stretching time as if delay might save me from the moment. It wasn’t vanity; it was hesitation. A quiet stalling of plans, as though being alone in public required armour, I wasn’t sure I had yet. I’m still learning to embrace doing things alone, but there is a beauty in it that keeps revealing itself to me, and maybe that’s the most romantic thing of all. 

The realisation shifted: what am I waiting for? No one was coming to push me or offer me a hand. Waiting for new things and experiences to come to me had become a barrier, and I needed to leave the waiting room. 

Then whatever comes next will come intentionally, not by waiting but by choosing. 

As for this year, Valentine’s Day will go on wrapped in red and pink. But for me, it will be a familiar Saturday night filled with my friends, music, and the comfort of being exactly where I am meant to be. Sometimes it shows up as choosing not to run from yourself, as staying and letting the quiet teach you something instead of fearing it.