“My best Valentine’s Day ever happened a few years ago. I spent it with my then-girlfriend at her parents’ house, which we had to ourselves. We cooked dinner together, drank wine and had a wonderfully laid-back evening. It was actually the first time I ever made Chicken Saltimbocca. I think I also made asparagus and some garlic mashed potatoes. What made it the best was that I spent it with her, and only her.

Being somewhat of a hopeless romantic, I spent many Valentine’s Days making grandiose gestures of what would prove to be unrequited love (though it was really just adoration). I once made a painting for a girl in my high school who was a couple years older than me, containing a poem that I’d written in her native language. It was pretty ridiculous, and it’s embarrassing to think about now, but I’m glad I did things like that and learned hard lessons. I realized later on that I was in search of a mostly fictional, commercialized version of “love,” and that I was chasing something that, had I eventually caught, would’ve proved unmanageable and indecipherable. What made that Valentine’s Day a few years ago so special was that it was one of those moments—however forced or commercialized in nature—that caused me to reflect on how lucky I was to finally understand the concept of love. It was something I thought I knew about my whole life, but it turned out I had never even felt what it really was.”