It’s starting.

Pink and red everywhere, candy, flowers, cupid: all signs are pointing to… yep, Single’s Awareness Day, also known as Valentine’s Day.

You know this holiday actually used to be a pagan holiday, celebrated on February 15th? The Catholic Church then took it over, moved the date and named it after St. Valentine, the patron saint of fertility.

I’m Stephanie, I’m single, and I don’t know about you, but I’m not too interested in celebrating the patron saint of fertility when I’m 31 years old and more single than Jane Austen. (By the way, Jane Austen just so happens to be Google’s most famous single person of all time – directly beating Oprah. You go, Jane Austen!)

Hey Catholic Church, couldn’t you have bumped this day into summer time? I just survived the holiday season where all of the family looks at you with pity, as if you are dying from leprosy, because you don’t have a ring on your finger. So what if my Facebook relationship status hasn’t changed since my last boyfriend in first grade (who happened to be a pen pal from another school far away that I never actually met)?

I have such a love-hate relationship with Valentine’s Day

I love chocolate, flowers, and fat little babies who shoot love arrows at strangers, but I hate the leprosy stares because I’m still single. So, I ask you, America, why can’t I just love Valentine’s Day?

I may not have romantic love yet, but I have an abundance of love in my life and give an abundance of love to other’s lives. I have two rescue dogs, who are obsessed with me and vice versa, friends and family coming out of my ears, nieces and nephews who are cuter than yours, co-workers, my baristas at Royal Blue Grocery and Starbucks, my breakfast and lunch ladies at Eatzi’s, my waitresses and waiters at MiCocina: listen, America, I have people I love and who love me, too.

Therefore, I am boycotting and protesting Valentine’s Day being a Single’s Awareness Day, and writing an executive order:

From here on out, February 14th will be a National Day to Celebrate Authentic Love. (Stephy for President 2021, everyone gets cookies, fat babies and board games.)

Valentine’s Day is a day of love, absolute love.

No love is greater than the next, or more important. I say it’s a day we show people how much they mean to us: no hidden agendas, no giving to get anything in return - simply showing pure, authentic love.

Christ talks about having child-like faith, but what if we had child-like love? When is the last time you looked into the eyes of a cute smiling one-year-old? Did your heart literally or metaphorically melt? Because when it comes to cute babies and puppies, I literally, and metaphorically, cannot tell the difference.

So what if we chose to show child-like love to those around us on February 14th?

What would that even look like? Would you make a card, give a cupcake, or give a great big hug? Or would you show your love in a new creative way, the kind of way only a child could have imagination enough to think up?

As human beings, we attach meanings to different things. We attach meanings to words, other humans, specific dates, and so on. What if we could change the meaning we attach to February 14, 2017? What if we could change the way we relate on a day that can be extremely hard on people suffering loss (through separation or even through death)? Could we turn a sad tear into a tear of joy or gratitude?

So often we go through times in our lives where we feel we don’t matter, that what we say doesn’t matter, and even that who we are doesn’t matter. Well, America, I am here to tell you – who you are, what you say, and what you do matters. It matters in the small scheme of things and in the large scheme of things because you matter. You matter to people you don’t even know you matter to. You could be the grumpy old lady who lives above me with her cat and gets onto me all the time for having friends over, or the cute boy at Eatzi’s who orders his breakfast before mine in the morning, and have no idea that you mattered to me that day. Whether it was grumpy old lady mattering or cute boy mattering – you mattered.

So I challenge you, on this Single’s Awareness Day National Day to Celebrate Authentic Love, to matter in the cute boy way: matter with positivity.

Show love.

Change someone’s sad tear to a tear of joy, bake a cupcake for your cousin, write a cheesy poem and give it to your best friend, leave a kind note on a windshield of a friend’s car you see, help an old lady across the street, pick a flower and give it to your co-worker, buy the person behind you coffee, do something kind.

Show love, give love, be love.