Valentine’s Day, the time of the year when everyone treats their significant other to a mass of presents, dates and love while breaking your wallet in the process. A time of chocolates and happiness to everyone across the land.

Unless you’re like me, whose love life is virtually non-existent. Not to say that I haven’t tried, it’s just that you can only go through so many failures on the dating scene before you start to reconsider the angle.

For me, after a while with lack of success, not fully understanding all the concepts, not really doing major considerations in dating at all and being pressured into trying to get into a relationship, I made the cognitive decision to remain single, at least for the time being, in a movement I have christened called being “forever single.” Its name stems from a running joke between my friends and I to discuss the continued failures of our love lives.

Now you may ask, why would anyone willingly put their love life on the side, especially while their other friends make advances in dating and going steady, to be intentionally single? It’s because I believe that love and dating are emotionally taxing things, even in the healthiest of relationships, especially if one is not ready enough to lead a dating life. In this day and age, many might feel forced to get into a relationship simply due to social pressure, ultimately leading to unhealthy and short-lived relationships and thus starting a poisonous cycle.

With this social pressure, the idea of being single is a very, unnecessarily, stigmatized concept, which pushes people further into trying to secure their significant other, even if they don’t want to.

With the “forever single” mindset, a person holds off the dating life while enjoying the other aspects of life they might enjoy. It would allow the other half who decides that dating is not for them to continue on with being single while being more comfortable with it. However, despite its name, “forever single” does not eliminate future partnerships entirely, as one can still choose to work on the dating scene in a limited scope until they feel comfortable with pursuing it on a wider scale.

This would help people not force their way into relationships before they’re ready, but also allows people to choose not to date and remove the stigmatism around being single. Thereby, showing that a person can have happiness in a single life, just as much as the other half who are dating.

But whether or not you agree to a single life, even temporarily, we can all agree on one matter.

I’ll be seeing y’all on Feb. 15 for the discount chocolates.