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Dear peanut butter, will you be my Valentine?

Amanda's Approach

Thirty-two years ago, my dad walked into a crowded restaurant and his eyes zeroed in on a girl sitting in a far corner - and, as they say, he knew. He just knew.

If I've ever had this feeling, it was the moment I first tried peanut butter.

I smell a jar of peanut butter like a bouquet of flowers, the scent taking me to third grade lunches and whispering in the kitchen at midnight. In every scoop, I feel the rush of giggles and ziploc bags and the dirt on baseball fields. I see my grandma's purple living room chair, salty crackers and lined notebook paper used for math homework. The taste is almost the least interesting quality.

There's a JIF factory in my hometown and on certain mornings, the wide city streets fill up with those memories, a slumber party sandwiched between a spoonful dropped in cookie dough.

I feel attached to peanut butter, in a big way. And I am in no way at a point in my life where I feel that way about a boy.

I say this because it's a week before Valentine's Day and my mind just kind of went there.

Brains have a habit of doing this, don't they? Of working like shaky light switches. They turn off and on, off and on, but not always in pattern that we can control.

In regard to Valentine's Day, it's a day that can haunt us a little bit if we let it. When we focus on the existence or absence of one form of love, at our age... Yikes.

I love plenty of things, like road trips, strong cups of dark coffee, good books and good friends.

There are a few, select things in our lives that spur a line of fuzzy feelings and that send us on a spontaneous highlight reel of happy memories.

Let's give over Valentine's Day to those things. If we don't get roses, let's make our own bouquet. If our status happens to be single, let's not feel bad about that.

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Let's give this day over to long car rides and conversations with best friends. To things we know with certainty, with gusto, that we do love.

Let's not fake it with the blurry lines of talking, snapchatting, tinder-ing, picture-liking. Let's not call love the ambiguous back and forth that happens at Brick Street or anything along the lines of "are we more than friends"?

I know love is hard for us college kids to define, but I've seen it and it's not only in fiction. Real love, in the cheesy Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan kind of way, isn't as temporary as we make it out to be. It's not flippant or easy. I'm tired of the noncommittal versions of boy-girl relationships that pass themselves off as love. I certainly don't want that.

I look at the way my dad gently reaches for my mom's fragile hand as they sit next to each other at the movies. I watch the intertwining knuckles as they spill bits of popcorn and I see the years of movie dates in their smiles. I want that.

But until then, until the real thing comes along, I'm good with peanut butter. Nothing can come close to or substitute the sweetness and realness of love, but I don't want to settle for an artificial brand. I'm good with a love of something that lasts beyond a weekend, something I can hold and return to.

I seek a sense of permanence that I get from peanut butter, the assurance that it can be restocked at Kroger at a moment's notice. For me, a good relationship will resemble a long grocery aisle that never runs out of essentials. That person will make me remember a million happy moments, with just the touch of a hand - that's how Ed Sheeran says it anyway.

So maybe on Valentine's Day, I'll lean against my counter and follow the peanut-scented trail back as far as my mind will go. I'll let my brain do the switching off and on.

I'll turn the lid off of a fresh jar and breathe in the fullness of the substance and once again get lost. A few seconds later, and the room could be filled with a thousand yellow flowers.