Would you be my Valentine? I'm not positive what it meant when I was six or seven, but I remember attaching a strong sense of social standing to those small folded pieces of paper we dropped into our construction paper heart-pockets. We let our favorite cartoon characters express the love and affection those of us who are too shy, or too passive-aggressive, to express ourselves. That, at the time, was all of us. Ahh, grade school.
Early in our social careers, the importance of romance is stressed as a sign of well-being, status, and forward personal momentum. We counted our Valentines like dollar bills back then, the most popular children banding them in stacks of twenty-five. Collecting crushes is a human past-time, one that can be difficult to stop practicing once you've gotten a taste: Like the man-eating lion, steal someone's heart, and all you want is more.
And we thought we were learning how to read and write.
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