Hello Daniel, love the work you do. In the spirit of the impending holiday, I was wondering if you had a memorable (good or bad) Valentine's experience you'd be willing to share with us?

True Story! I had my first real kiss with a girl from a neighboring town when I was in high school, and we had a few like really early, lame, Classic Daniel-in-High-School Dates (Classic Daniel-in-HS Date = Chain Restaurant + Movie + Asking You Lots of Questions + Driving You Around Telling You What One of My Favorite Songs is About). This started in January, which is a tough time to start a relationship because it’s so close to Valentine’s Day and suddenly you’re in this odd situation with strange rules and expectations that are all getting in the way of your very early, casual relationship.

So about a week before Valentine’s Day I said over AOL Instant Messenger “Hey, should we go out Saturday? It doesn’t need to be like an official Valentine’s Day thing, it could just be a Saturday, because I know we haven’t really been going out that long, and we haven’t even talked about what we ‘are’ or what we’re ‘doing’ and I’m not trying to rush that conversation, because I’m totally cool with the as-yet-undiscussed thing that we’re doing, I just saw that a Saturday was coming up (as often happens) and Saturday is usually when we see each other, and I still wanted to see you, but I didn’t want you to think there was any kind of Valentine’s Day pressure, mostly my Mom just wants to know if I need to borrow her car this Saturday, so I need to let HER know, which is why I’m trying to arrange this a week in advance, you know? It’s more about scheduling? Anyway it’s fine if a) you are busy on Saturday or b) you think it would be GREAT to do an officially-sanctioned Valentine’s Day thing or c) you want to go out in a low-pressure, classic Saturday type of situation where we pretend it isn’t Valentine’s Day [which is a weird made-up holiday and we don’t even totally understand the origins of it did you know that?] or d) you think it’s weird to go out on Valentine’s Day at this stage of our still-unclassified non-relationship, so you’d like to skip it, though you’d still like to in the future continue this still-unclassified non-relationship. All options are fine, just let me know, and sorry for making this weird.”

And she said “Daniel. Dummy. I’d love to go out Saturday.”

And then on Saturday morning, she IM’d me to say “I actually can’t go out tonight. I forgot to tell you but I am moving.”

And we never saw each other again!