Shop! In the name of love

Teen Times:So, there I was, the middle of Galway's Shop Street, Saturday afternoon. The atmosphere was foreboding, to say the least. The place was normal enough, except for one thing. Every man on the street had a determined but anxious look on his face, writes Eoin Cashman.

It's the same look that you'll see on the face of a student before a big exam or a defendant before his verdict is announced. We were all there on the same mission: to sate the expectations of St Valentine's Day.

I had €30 in my wallet. For some this is a paltry amount, while for others it's an extravagance. I reckoned it would be easy to buy whatever was necessary with this. It's not as if there are particular criteria to satisfy when shopping for romance. Or are there? The more I thought of it the more daunting it became. The present itself was important, but so too were the messages it transmitted. Too cheap and she'd feel I didn't value her, too expensive and . . . frankly, too expensive wasn't an option.

Later that day I asked myself, is this what it's all about? Signals, codes and ciphers, all to be tiptoed around - those emotional minefields that are relationships. It didn't sound like fun. Long gone are the days when a husband's stunted sense of romance called the Valentine's Day tune; women's expectations have raised the bar considerably. In fact, if you took a rather twisted stance on it all, you could blame all this Valentine's Day nonsense on Simone de Beauvoir and other feminists of the 20th century. That would also explain why French men are supposedly the most romantic. They've simply been in training longer than the rest of us.

So is St Valentine's Day simply a ploy by women to coerce us into buying them expensive gifts? Let's be honest, it is quite often a one-way transaction when it comes to presents, whether it be flowers, chocolate or jewellery. Regardless of whether it is truly a celebration of love or just the remnants of an ancient ritual announcing the arrival of spring, I don't really care. If it passes quickly and painlessly, allowing me to return to my old ways, I'll be happy.

The whole event does fly in the face of the aphorism that you can't buy love, though. Either way, I decided to keep my money in my wallet. As my grandfather used to say, "Sure what good are flowers when ya can't eat them?" Some may call me a cynic, others a miser, I see myself as sensible.

Whether my girlfriend sees it that way or not is another matter altogether! Watch this space.

Eoin Cashman (17) is a Leaving Cert student at St Joseph's College, Nun's Island, Galway.

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