My husband rested his arm across my body. His hand pushed gently toward my breasts. I raced to fold my arms over them before he got there first.

Valentine's Day is upon us once again. A celebration of love and romance, it is also the only holiday I know of that makes everybody miserable. Everybody. I've yet to meet the person who looks forward to this day. V-Day is hardly the only holiday that imposes a sense of obligation upon people (hello, Christmas!), but it's unique in the way that nobody seems to get anything out of it, either. Either your expectations are met, which is boring, or they aren't, and everyone gets upset.

In each of my three sections of English Fundamentals this week, we read Mark Halliday's Young Man on Sixth Avenue, and in each class I asked students to come up with two or three conflicts they saw present in the story. All three classes came up with the good, but conventional ones: the Young Man vs. his inner self; the Young Man vs. society; the Young Man vs. life. In my third and final class today, a young woman raised her hand and said she saw in the story a conflict between gains and losses.