Valentine’s Day can be special sans pink

What happens when you and your significant other are like old people:

According to the National Retail Federation, Americans will spend $19.7 billion on Valentine’s Day this year. The average person will spend $146.84 while $681 million alone will be spent on pets.

While I don’t have a pet to shower faux candy hearts on, I do have a boyfriend who finds maroon roses decorated in a pink vase just as tedious as I do. He is also allergic to extreme food coloring. Not that I mind — I’m not a fan of cinnamon hearts either. I suppose that’s what happens when you reach the stage of texting each other numerous poop emojis as words of encouragement.

I regress back to baby speech in our texts because I now know that he’ll know the gist of what I have to say. Too much effort is involved when I have to use correct grammar and syntax. Who cares when the other person knows what you mean anyway? The only thing I will not do is use “u” — unless it’s with sarcasm. In fact, our most recent conversation went like this:

Me: Does staples refill [printer] ink

Boyfriend: I thought it was only OfficeMax but you can call and ask the next time we’ll give it to them to refill

Me: What is Office Max?

My excuse in that last text there is that I’m from Canada where we have sexier names for our office supply stores like Canadian Office Supplies Inc., or Upper Canada Office Systems, which I didn’t know existed until a recent Google search. We also have a Staples, which is where I get the majority of my stuff.

In any case my boyfriend is synonymous with Google, therapist and cushion. Most of our friends complain that we aren’t exciting enough. For instance, an example of an ideal Friday night is spent with Game of Thrones, Narcos, Netflix-flavour-of-the-month, some kind of diabetes-inducing dessert and me dead as a log to the world by 11:30 p.m. It’s uncanny how quickly I can fall asleep.

With that in mind, naturally a few days before Valentine’s Day we went to eat. All my Valentine’s Days so far have been memorable in their own way. Last year on Valentine’s Day a good friend from Brown came to visit and we trekked for a few hours in the snow to Hampden, happily froze at the Inner Harbor and then ate at an upscale (which was the only restaurant that accepted reservations that afternoon — and now I know why) restaurant in Fell’s Point that only offered prix-fixe menus and unintentionally deflated our wallets by half. Afterwards we came back in during a 4.8 Uber surge in the midst of a snowstorm. A few years earlier I recognized Valentine’s Day as Single Awareness Day. So there’s that.

My track record indicates that I apparently bypass sleeping in when I’m expected to and instead head straight for food. It also shows that holidays like Thanksgiving I become irrationally angry when I’m hungry. So it was before we left for our Valentine’s Day adventure that my boyfriend turned back and looked at me with a sudden fear in his eyes.

“Do you want to eat something before we go?”

“No,” I said affronted. “What do you think I am? A bottomless pit?”

He shot me a look. “Not even a small breakfast?”

I stalked into the elevator.

We went for one of those homely-yet-beautiful sandwiches that make you salivate by just thinking about them — with aged prosciutto and cheese and roasted whatever. It disappeared into my stomach within minutes. We also went for gelato. It was fantastically cold outside as my breath froze around me. I am also lactose intolerant. So we dug in.

“Thank god,” my boyfriend said when I finally came up for air after the sandwich and the dessert. He asked for my opinion on the food and I was too happy to talk with my brain half-frozen and the other half in a slushy pile of satiety. “I was pretty worried that you would spontaneously combust into flames of hangry.”

When we came back we spent the afternoon talking about what happened when we were in kindergarten. I told him that I liked to climb the monkey bar set and stay there until I had to be forced down by my teachers.

At the turnstiles back at Commons I saw a bundle of roses sitting in a “Have a happy day!” plastic bag from UniMini on a bench. But for me that was indignity. Red roses for a holiday (a holiday organized by the team who didn’t get to organize Christmas, as some wise person said) tossed carelessly on top of a bench the color of Barney — I mean have a happy day, really? Almost immediately I was slightly agitated that immediately I had jumped to such a flippant conclusion. It wasn’t Valentine’s day just yet, and the owner probably just bought the flowers and left them there while he or she ran an errand somewhere else.

My boyfriend knew exactly what I was thinking and squeezed my hand as we went inside. “Didn’t you want red roses instead?” he asked, his expression guiltless. I made a face.

But that’s the thing — it’s as a day dedicated to appreciation. I’m glad there’s at least one day of the year during which I can enjoy all the things (let’s face it, it’s just food) I do with someone who understands. Even at the expense of overwhelming pink.

Sabrina Wang is a sophomore neuroscience major from Vancouver.