You know that nightmare where every single day is Valentine's Day?

I'm living it, right now.

You know, I didn't do too badly on Valentine's Day. I didn't spend half an hour banging my head against my locker (although admittedly, when one is a year eleven, one doesn't even have thirty seconds to spare, let alone thirty minutes), I didn't eat chocolate or ice cream (at all. I knew once I started I wouldn't stop) and I basically spent the day avoiding taken people and hanging out too much with the Untakens.  And I didn't send myself anything. That would be the epitome of loser. I am proud to say I have never sunk to that level, even when...oh, never mind.

But now Valentine's Day seems pretty much eternal, and it's getting pretty damn annoying.

There are people kissing in the ice rink. Like, on the ice. It's really, really gross. If you're cold you wear a sweater, not your boyfriend. And do you know how hard it is to dodge couples who are randomly making out/holding hands and staring into each other's eyes/skating with various body parts linked together/spontaneously having sex? Pretty damn hard, I tell you.

The year elevens make out at the lockers. Not very convenient when you're late for English and you've got a couple plastered over your locker, and the five lockers surrounding your locker. They also hog all the study tables on the top floor, because apparently it's not very romantic to sit on the floor like the other mortals do. I know year eleven is stressful, but surely, surely it is possible to survive it without random staring competitions with signficant others, excessive hand holding and spontaneous hugs at the door to the girl's toilets/the drink fountain/the bottom of the staircase. The year tens are even worse. One dude bought his gf ten roses. That's thirty dollars. I could have bought a steak with that. 

Seeing year eights all coupled up is weird, too. Don't get me wrong, we all had our first boyfriends when we were eleven, but when you're in the sixth grade of a seven-grade school, you're pretty grown up. Year eights are like babies. It's very...odd.

Teenage boys seem incapable of anything but sport and study, and sometimes only one and sometimes neither. Call me sexist, but try and prove me wrong. Those who don't fit this sad stereotype are the Mr Bingleys, chasing the Jane Bennets of the world. They say that men aren't born romantic or with a parental instinct, but surely that would be necessary to continue our species? All parental duty shouldn't rely on one sex.

Girls learn about unconditional love from a very young age. It is natural - I give you, so you give me. For boys love is more like you give me, and I might give you just a little. Love from boys seems very conditional. In the good ol' days of the times when women were treated more like animals than humans, the condition was 'I'll love you if you take the place of my wife, my mother, my slave and my dog'. Now the condition is 'I'll love you if you're pretty' or 'I'll love you if you're perfect' or 'I'll love you if you let me fuck around...but don't you get any ideas!' The only time this is swapped is if the girl is impossibly hot and the boy is a sad, lonely, fat nerd.

There are too many standards for women to live up to, and they're so contradictory, hypocritical. We're 'giving in' if we get too skinny, but we're simply intolerable if we're voluptuous. Men have different ideas of what is curvy, and what is fat, etc. We pick on each other too much, too - girls can be massive bitches, even to their friends - and we pick on ourselves too much, too. Men? They meet the occasional intimidating beefcake, but all to often I have seen a girl painted and manicured to perfection with a guy wearing what appears to be a football jersy with his pajama pants, emmitting a foul odour of hamburgers, cigarettes and beer.

Hot girl, fug dude. Non-hot girl, still a fug dude. I hope that when they and I are older they will see past these superficial standards that make up much of teenage love. Until then, I'll do the Darcy swoon. When one's dating prospects are as bad as this, fictional characters are not such a bad option after all.