"Valentine’s Day is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap."

The internet has had an absolutely bizarre

effect on dating because it’s reversed the most basic, natural order of things.

The way it’s always gone is that you spend time with someone until they become an idea: A vessel for all of your hopes and aspirations, a tablet onto which you project your own concepts of love and romance and whatever neuroses you happen to bring to the table. For better or for worse, your view of your partner gets less and less objective. The fact that they are a tangible human being becomes secondary to all the feelings they represent to you personally.

When you meet someone on the internet, they start as an idea. All you can do is try and cobble together a cohesive picture of them based on all their posts and photos, what they seem to enjoy and their aesthetic sensibilities. Even the littlest things - how they punctuate, what they reblog, their use of emoticons - all of these tiny expressions get channeled into your mental attempt to imagine a cohesive person. But no matter how hard you try, all you have is that attempt.

Until, one day, you meet them.

And this individual - who had previously been confined to an LCD screen and composed entirely of hyperlinks and GIFs - has all at once become a breathing organism made out of skin, hair, bones, and other soft parts. And suddenly, this person has materialized from an idea into a tangible human being.

If that’s not a little bit freaky, I don’t know what is.