Cardiac-related, elusive intangible feeling based grumble.

Yep, it's the fourteenth. You know what that means. It's the annual "Look at how happy we are compared to you" day, featuring every couple in existence fighting it out in one huge deathmatch of love. A friend of mine recently wrote an article discussing this yearly competition. It's most enlightening. You can find it here, and educate yourself. I encourage you to do so.

Now, this post is not going to be a huge rant about Valentines Day per se. At least, not directly. Woe betide I should argue against it, for then given my status as a single man, a bachelor if you will, my argument would be mooted by the fact that I would be removed from view and categorised in the "bitter and alone" camp. Fine, let them go ahead with their day of dancing, romancing and other things ending in -ing.

It is the principle of the day which bugs me. As a flipside to Kat's well observed argument on the idea of both single and attached girls being renegade love competitors in a ranking system known only unto themselves, I would like to discuss the effect this dreaded colour and sentiment fest has on the single men of this world.

In the real world, he'd have ripped that out of someone with the claws this version doesn't have.

And no, I do not want anyone, anyone at all, to start thinking of the genetic rejects on that hideous television tribute to a poor grasp on the English language, Take Me Out, as single men. They are a lesser species. "No likey, no lighty" indeed.

You see, for the single male who may and often is as impressionable, sensitive and societally guided as the single woman, it is easy to be convinced by people, if you let them, that exactly a fortnight into February you should have an epiphany. The thunderbolt that strikes you should, so people say, inform you and change your world view to a bleak and undeniable truth. Your entire existence boils down to whether or not there is a significant other within your life who you have the ability and wherewithal to laud with overpriced pink things, and overpriced pink sweets, and overpriced meals, and overpriced coloured, folded and glittered sheets of dead tree. Should you find yourself sans person to shower in gag-inducing adoration, you are essentially worthless, as you have not won.

"Love's not a competition," these clever chaps say, "but I'm winning."

You have not bought the most thoughtful, or the most expensive, or the most loving, or the cutest present among your male peers for your current charge. You have no person with which to partake in such a hideously pink-balloon filled nightmare. And therefore, you have lost.

Just a short complaint, really, about this horrible commercial excuse of a day that businesses somehow confuse people into thinking holds the key to their happiness as a couple among couples. So long as she has, and he has bought of his own thought and volition, that huge fucking teddy with a heart in its paws.