By: Nolan Freder
Durham, North Carolina –One year. Three hundred and sixty-five days. Eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty hours. Or, as I prefer to measure it, precisely one Earth rotation since I liberated myself from the romantic Alcatraz that was my last relationship.
You think Valentine’s Day is about whispered sweet nothings and aggressively red roses? You’re laughably, pathetically wrong. This year, we’re redefining romance, one slice of overly-sweetened, vaguely-dairy-adjacent dessert at a time. Forget your candlelit dinners; this is about fluorescent lighting and the quiet hum of existential dread mixed with the insistent beeping of the pager system at… yes, The Cheesecake Factory.
How does one truly honor such a monumental act of self-rescue? With performative coupledom at some overpriced bistro? Please. We’re journalists here, people of substance. We deal in facts, and the fact is, freedom tastes best with a side of heavily processed cream cheese and a graham cracker crust of questionable structural integrity.
Ambiance? Think airport terminal meets Vegas buffet, but somehow less sincere. Observe the couples. Specimen A, early 20s, aggressively coiffed hair, clutching a wilting bouquet clearly purchased from a gas station. Specimen B, same age bracket, vacant stare suggesting pre-emptive relationship fatigue. They are here for the performance of Valentine’s Day. We, dear reader – yes, you, dragged here under the pretense of ‘dinner’ – we are here for truth.
Tonight, we aren’t celebrating manufactured romance; we are celebrating escape velocity. One year ago, I executed a flawless disengagement from a romantic entanglement that was, to put it mildly, less fulfilling than a diet water. Did I weep? Perhaps, briefly, for dramatic effect. Did I wallow? Absolutely, for a medically recommended 48-hour period, complete with a curated playlist of aggressively melancholic indie folk and a family-sized tub of suspiciously orange cheese puffs. But then, I rose. Like a phoenix. Or, more accurately, like someone who finally got their security deposit back after a truly nightmarish roommate situation.
What better venue for this rebirth than The Cheesecake Factory? Some might call it ‘basic.’ I call it democratized decadence. It’s a monument to choice, a sprawling menu that mirrors the vast, limitless possibilities of single life. Look around you. Observe the sheer volume of options. Fifty-plus cheesecakes alone. Fifty-plus! That’s more choices than I had in my entire previous relationship, which, in retrospect, offered about as much variety as a beige-on-beige color palette.
You, my… ‘date,’ let’s call you, for lack of a more accurate journalistic term (research subject? bystander?), you seem… perplexed. You thought we were celebrating actual Valentine’s Day? Bless your heart. No, we are here to mark the anniversary of my romantic emancipation. Think of it as a liberation parade, but with more carbohydrates and significantly less public acclaim.
You’re glancing at the couples again. Don’t. They are trapped in a saccharine vortex of forced intimacy and shared appetizers. We are free. We can order separate entrees. We can judge their dessert choices silently and without consequence. We can leave whenever we damn well please, without having to coordinate an exit strategy with someone who will inevitably want to ‘split the bill fairly’ down to the last agonizing penny.
Tonight, I order the Celebration Cheesecake. Irony? Perhaps. But also, delicious. And isn’t that what freedom truly tastes like? A vaguely unsettlingly sweet, towering monument to independent caloric consumption?
So, yes, Happy Breakup Anniversary to me. And Happy… uh… ‘Observational Field Trip’ to you, my bewildered companion. Enjoy the ambiance. Try the avocado eggrolls. And remember, in the grand journalistic pursuit of truth, sometimes, the most compelling stories are found not in whispered sonnets, but in the aggressively cheerful, vaguely unsettling glow of The Cheesecake Factory on Valentine’s Day. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe I saw a server with a fresh slice of Tiramisu Cheesecake, and journalistic integrity compels me to investigate further.
We’re not okay, and neither are you, probably.
