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Of Valentine's jinxes and packaged gnocchi
Ever since I dumped my eighth-grade boyfriend, I've been single on Feb. 14. I also couldn't make homemade pasta. Turns out, these things are related.
By Rebecca Traister

Feb. 14, 2008 | I. In the eighth grade, I dumped my boyfriend on Valentine's Day. He was my first boyfriend, and when I say "boyfriend," I mean he was my best friend. The fruits of our romantic liaison included: one meal at a flowery restaurant of indeterminate European origin (my first experience with both veal cannelloni and steak tartare), one school dance, one viewing of "When Harry Met Sally" while sitting awkwardly on a couch, and hours and hours spent obsessing over the romantic comedies of the 1930s. We did not kiss. We may once have held hands.

I dumped him because, sometime that winter, I also made a new female friend, who asserted that my faux-relationship was silly. She was, in many ways, correct. As Valentine's Day approached with all its humiliations and hormones -- the in-class carnations and kissing and public tallying of desire! -- she and I cooked up a plan to spare me any awkward proclamations of affection from a boyfriend with whom I had no sturdy romantic bond: I would ditch him first. I fooled myself that my actions were both kind and direct, but in truth I had veered carelessly into the barbaric margins of adolescent femininity. I was tone-deaf to romance. And in the tenderest of years, on the most nervous-making of teenage days, I broke up with my closest friend.

I feel so bad about what I did that I have effectively scrubbed all of the most shameful details from my memory. (Though I don't believe my ex-boyfriend has; he remains a friend, the most talented person I know, and often calls to wish me a happy Valentine's Day.) What I recall is that the exchange took place in our school library, and I think there might have been a poem, and possibly a piece of music he had written in my name. Whatever he gave me, I promptly returned to him, along with a few frosty words. He was surprised and saddened. I was determined and unmoved. Whatever happened in the Friends Free Library that Valentine's Day, I emerged a single woman.

And a single woman I have remained, on each of the subsequent 18 Valentine's Days. It's not that I haven't been in relationships since. But remarkably, never on Feb. 14.

I lived through the rest of high school without dating; all white carnations for me. College, of course, was a four-year Valentine's Day joke. I didn't have any long-term boyfriends, and if I had, everyone was way too cool (and broke and drunk) to mark it in any earnest way. During my 20s in New York, I was mostly single, and even during a nearly four-year relationship, my boyfriend and I managed, rather inefficiently, to break up annually just before Christmas and reunite in the spring, leaving us single during the cold Januaries and Februaries of our acquaintance.

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