It’s that time of year when the shops are filled with pink tat — you know, even more useless stuff than you find at Christmas — cheap pink foil-wrapped chocolate hearts, cuddly teddies clutching bunches of roses and all sorts of other fluffy, cutesy stuff.

Romance and love is depicted as being all hearts, chocolates and flowers. Love is the kind of thing that, when we don’t have it but desperately miss it or when it’s going well we see as the best thing in the world. It’s fuzzy and pink and fondant-y.

It’s easy to forget about the gut-wrenching part of it. I don’t mean break-ups.

Being in love, even the requited kind, is a bit like sheepishly and carefully taking your heart out of your chest and handing it over to someone you hope you can trust to take care of it. We’ve all given our hearts to people who’ve treated it like an unloved DVD — they’ve scratched it up a little, misplaced it or, perhaps even smashed it to pieces.

But, even when you give it to someone who, by your best judgments looks like someone who will look after it and treat it like their most precious belonging, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to relax and let them look after it as if it’s their own. You keep having to check on it, reminding them to take care of it and, sometimes, you might even catch them being a little careless with it.

That’s how relationships feel to me, anyway.

You’ve handed over something to somebody else and, if they don’t look after it, you know it will temporarily destroy you. It feels like quite a reckless and stupid thing to do, at times but, once you’ve done it it’s harder to get it back than it is to give it in the first place.

Sometimes I think Valentine’s Day tat should be covered in geometric prints and spikes to symbolise the challenges and frustration but, ultimately, the beauty of love.

Anyway, enough with all that stuff that doesn’t mean anything. I am upset and angry with myself and my boyfriend this morning.

He’s one of those types who likes to shut himself away when the world gets too much and, for the past two nights he’s not been home. I knew he’d be away for one planned night but last night was a horrid surprise. I expected him back at midnight so, when 1.30am, 3am, 4.30am and 8am rolled around and there was no answer to my calls or my messages, I didn’t know what to think. Accident? Cheating on me? Has he left me?

In the last hour he’s finally been in touch to say he needed more time, he drank too much and stayed at his friends. He’s on his way home. So many questions and so much anger.

I wonder if you can ever find someone who’ll treat your heart like the delicate, sensitive organ it is.

While being in love is brilliant, it’s also scary. You give up a little of your independence. You invest so much in that person — if they’re unhappy, you’re unhappy, if they’re restless, you are. If they don’t call you or come home for two nights, your insides kind of disintegrate a little. That’s the flipside to the hearts and flowers, I guess.