I woke up this morning not only with the “Oh, FUCK. It’s Monday” mindset, but also with the grim knowledge that it was FEBRUARY, to boot.

This is my least favorite month. You’re past the holidays, but Spring isn’t coming for a long way yet. It’s bleak, it’s cold, and smack dab in the middle is Valentine’s Day.

My relationship with Valentine’s Day is complicated. Not “complicated” in the sense that I’m sleeping with it a couple of times a month and pretending not to care that it’s flirting with other women on Facebook. It’s complicated because of dredged-up memories of Valentine’s Day parties at school where I’d only get a couple of cards from the kids whose parents made them write cards to EVERYBODY. Pity Valentines. It’s complicated because of the Valentines Day in 1986, when I got a carnation in homeroom from “Guess Who?” and I spent the entire day CONVINCED it was from the guy I’d been crushing on for MONTHS, and it turned out to be from this weird kid in my F Block History class.

As Coombsie, and any of my ex-boyfriends for that matter, can tell you – I am about the least “romantic” person on this spinning ball of overheating rock. This is not to say that I’m unsentimental. I openly wept into my box of pretzel M&Ms during Les Misérables. I’m just not especially romantic. I am not into flower petals on the duvet, long walks on the beach, overpriced 3-course dinners in a restaurant full of people trying to get laid, doing weird things with food in the bedroom, lacy undergarments besieged with hooks and snaps that push and lift parts of me that are perfectly happy where they are…any of it.

Any song that references tangled sheets, dreams, breezes in trees or across bodies of water, or being in love with your best friend, gets instant side-eye from me. In fact, when I started dating Coombsie I was all, “For God’s sake, whatever you do, DON’T WRITE A SONG ABOUT ME.” Fortunately, he’s strictly an ax man, so I’ve been quite safe for the last 16 years or so.

You know that episode of Star Trek where they land on the looooove planet and Spock starts acting all goofy and like he’s going to write that Leila bint a song about tangled sheets? GROSSES ME OUT. EVERY SINGLE TIME. Whenever it comes on I start tensing up and yelling, “Ew. Ew! EW! Change the channel! CHANGE IT RIGHT NOW I CANNOT DEAL WITH THIS.”

Know what I like? 5:30 in the afternoon on Valentine’s Day at CVS. The desperation. Dudes coming in and buying the red-cellophane-wrapped boxes of candy that’ve been on the shelf since December 26th. That makes me so happy.

I bet some of you are starting to feel sorry for Coombsie, being married to such a cold, hard, unromantic data jockey such as myself. Sometimes I feel sorry for him, too. Like he should be married to someone who listens to John Mayer or something. Because, okay, Coombsie’s birthday is in March and somebody asked me what I was going to get him and I was like, “Wellll, he kind of wants a new meat thermometer.” And when I got a weird look (kind of like the one you’re giving right now) I yelled, “THIS WOULD MAKE HIM VERY HAPPY, OKAY?!” JESUS.