Valentine's Day approaches, with its inevitable flood of downright commercialised expressions of love. Friends know that this day is one of my most hated in the year - whether or not I'm attached. If you're alone, then of course, it's easy to tell why you hate that day. If you're with someone, however, there's just so much pressure on you to do something, anything at all, to show that you love your significant other - something that I kind of scoff at, and yet yearn for. I'm not one who needs my 'other half' to give me gifts, but having received precious few over the years, I guess I'm just feeling deprived.

I recall a time when my cousin, her best friend and I were all seated in a car and looking wistfully after a couple. We all had the same envious reactions despite our different circumstances; my cousin had never had a boyfriend, my cousin's best friend's boyfriend was in another city, and I was still getting over my first ex. I found it a little amusing at first that despite the fact that we were all different, we all still yearned to be part of a couple. At the time, I told my cousin she was lucky. Feeling envious because you want that something which you've never had a chance to experience, in my mind, was much better than having been through that experience and then being plunged back into loneliness. She, naturally, took a different view - that of the "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" school of thought.