It’s Valentine’s Day, and I’ve thought long and hard about how I want to address that. Earlier in the week, I’d toyed with not mentioning it at all and just posting something else I’d written; I thought about how I don’t want the only two themes of my posts to be relationships or my disability, even though I know that those are the topics my readers gravitate towards. But Valentine’s Day is a big deal for lots of people (whether they want it to be or not), since everyone is so aggressively brainwashed to believe that we each need a romantic relationship to experience true happiness or success and that this is the time when we get to show off that happiness and success. Or, we get to not, and then have it implied that we should be sad about that.

I remember when I was about 18, talking to my mum about boyzz, and saying that I thought the reason I’d had disappointing experiences was because I trust people too easily. She scoffed at that, asked what I meant, and said ‘you don’t trust anyone’. That makes her sound really brutal – she’s not brutal, but she is honest, and she made me realise that I like to tell myself that just because I’m extroverted and kind, that that equates to me being super trusting of others. Except, what she said to me when I was 18 remains true as I type this as a 22-year-old: romantically, I don’t trust lads as far as I could throw them.

This lack of trust isn’t founded in some intense trauma; I might have had some bad luck in romance so far, but I’m fortunate to have never suffered that badly from it. Honestly, the worst thing that’s happened to me in that arena is that the very few lads I was really interested in have hidden me. The first boy I ever really liked actively kept me a secret, by asking me to do things like turn my Snapchat maps off if I went to his house so nobody knew I was there, he’d never post me on his story like he would when he was seeing other girls, and he’d only be out in public with me if it suited him. Then there were the other couple of crushes who preferred a kiss behind closed doors and us to never mention it again.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: all of that’s awful and I don’t seem like someone to stand for that ridiculously toxic behaviour with the things I say in these blogs. You’re right about both of those things. I tolerated all of that sh*t when I was younger because it was subtle, I was desperate to be a part of the romantic relationship world, and we don’t always practice what we preach when we’re in the situation.

If I were to describe how I’d feel about being in a relationship now though, I honestly think that my main feeling would be terror. (I laughed when I typed that though, so don’t read this as if I’m crying about it.) I guess I’m scared of being with someone because I have absolutely no idea what that’d look like in my life: I’ve seen others do it, but I don’t know who I’d be in that context. So, the prospect of that degree of new experiences and emotions is ridiculously exciting, yet I can’t help but be scared of it as well.

I think that Valentine’s Day is a funny one because it’s nauseatingly commercialised, and it’s one day of the year when people seem to be obnoxiously happy or obnoxiously bitter or ambivalent about the whole thing. We all know that in the grand scheme of things it matters very little if you get a bit of cardboard through the door saying ‘be my Valentine’ or not, but at the same time, many of us can end up feeling pretty low when the 14th February is like any other day. That’s just because we’re human, and we want to experience love.

So, even though we know Valentine’s Day is pretty pointless, be as obnoxiously happy or sad or anything in between as you want. Plus, it’s Pancake Day soon!