I get it. We are college students. That means we are broke and we really do not have time or energy to squander on Valentine’s Day. So here is a guide to scraping by this holiday with the bare minimum and without emptying your bank account and losing your sanity. Just take these ideas with a grain of salt.
Dates with your significant other
Simple answer: dorm-made meal and movie night. The first step is to rent a movie from the library and make sure it does not have a huge emphasis on love, like Love Actually, so there will not be a lot of pressure on you. So I repeat, do not rent Love Actually. Do rent something that has eye candy for both you and your date to enjoy. And make sure that the plot is not too complicated so there is room for conversation. I guess Transformers is an optimal choice.
Afterwards, if you are spending your night with someone special, you can gather flowers from the pathways on campus to make a bouquet for her or him. If there are no flowers to be found, then gather some sticks and tell him or her that you are attempting to achieve a more natural aesthetic to counteract the omnipotence of capitalistic and consumer-driven modernity. Alternatively, you can just say “baby, you can light my fire.” Then you should go to the P.O.D. and acquire popcorn and materials for s’mores. As a bonus: they usually sell Valentine Day’s gifts!
Also, you might want to pick up some of those Playboy condoms. Actually, I heard that there is an STD outbreak in San Antonio. Safety is sexy, kids. Also, if it does progress to that point after establishing it is consensual by both parties involved, you can always hook up your iPod to your speakers, which you should do anyway out of courtesy to your neighbors. However, do not spend money on buying music, just install the Pandora app for free and put it on to Luther Vandross or Rihanna station “” depending on your style. The total cost: free, suckas (well, besides the cost to your meal plan).
Group Hang-outs
Valentine’s Day is usually difficult because this holiday is targeted for couples. Instead, you can call up the homies and have a chill night in your dorm. You all can eat too many cookies, paint nails, have a Taylor Swift dance party and Netflix it up. There are so many fantastic shows on Netflix, now, like “Arrested Development” and “Sherlock” that you can spend your night with the likes of Michael Cera or Martin Freeman (you may know him as Bilbo Baggins). All of these previous suggestions were gender-neutral, by the way.
But why stay in? You should celebrate the one thing that people in relationships do not have, and that’s freedom! It is possible to avoid all the gross coupling stuff by deliberately hanging out in single people-dominated insular areas, so you know that places will actually be fun. The carnival at the San Antonio Rodeo has $15 entry on Thursdays. And Cowboys Dancehall has “Ladies Nights” on Thursdays as well “” ladies get in for free. Also, Hardbodies usually has some sort of special on Valentine’s Day (and this is also a gender-neutral suggestion).
