The smell of a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bar follows you home like a cigarette you haven’t smoked. Anatomically incorrect hearts dance about the streets. You try to ignore them, but they know what avoidance smells like, and you stink. It’s Valentine’s Day again. You are single again. Not to be ignored, it can be a difficult time for many of us and while these suggestions may not alleviate all agony, we can only hope they help a little.
Spend Time with Pals
Grab hold of a few of your single buds and make your way up to the Maths Support Centre on Level One of James Joyce Library. Haggle (gently) with one of the tutors and get their number-crunching brain to help you out. Together, compile a list of your coupled-up mates, and work out the odds of them breaking up in the next six months. Place your bets. Extra marks for figuring out who will break up with who. This is a great bonding exercise that will bring you closer to people, no doubt.
Seize the Means of Procreation
Pop by your local supermarket and make sure to walk extra slowly down the Valentine’s Day-adorned aisle. Ensure your grumbling is audible. Make a point of how Valentine’s Day is just an excuse to consume even more products. Forget about the fact that every single holiday is commercialised, as you propose that love itself has been manufactured by the bourgeoisie. While you’re there, you may as well mount the stuffed animals into inappropriate positions, just to act as a reminder to couples that what they understand to be love, is merely chemicals bouncing their respective genitalia off each other.
Go for a Scroll
Valentine’s Day is the perfect excuse to hit up your old Tinder account again. Tinder is full of people looking for all things love and lust, and maybe, just maybe, you too will find the love of your life in the endless sea of selfies. Most importantly, when swiping right for a lover it is integral to remember that there is only one true reason to find a partner, and that is to have some sort of hope at renting your own gaff. Even with the two of you, you’d be struggling, or moving back in with your Ma. Consider polyamory, even if it isn’t something you would be into. With four or five of you chipping in, you might be able to afford a one bed apartment. Luckily, you can all share.
Let It All Out
Thankfully, here in UCD, there are many completely accessible and definitely well-funded resources in order for one to express their deepest, darkest emotions, such as the Newman bathrooms. Thankfully, many before you have felt the same gut-wrenching fear of loneliness and expressed such in elegant ways along the walls. Read the inspirational quotes. Touch them. Give them a lick, and hope you begin to feel a little better.
Savannah Murray – Arts & Lifestyle Writer
