TOMORROW is Valentine’s day, and you also need milk and kitchen roll. What does the afterthought of a card you slip into the basket say about your love? 

£1.50 from Asda

Your relationship is as healthy as it’s ever been, given that neither of you really cares about it. There are children to feed, a mortgage to pay, and a lifelong partnership to be cursorily acknowledged. Tomorrow you will have sex in much the same ‘well, I suppose we should’ spirit. The climaxes will be satisfactory.

£3.75 from Sainsbury’s

It’s all falling apart. Your life, your relationship, your grip on yourself. There’s never enough f**king time or enough f**king money for anything, not like when you were younger and went on romantic citybreaks to Berlin. Now it’s all you can do to grab a card between one daughter’s dance rehearsal and the other’s viola lesson and shit, you forgot chocolates.

£2.50 from Tesco Metro

Casually picked up on the way to his flat, written in the foyer, presented semi-ironically in the expectation he’ll have forgotten and will have to make up for it with expensive alcohol and a takeaway, your relationship is doing fine because you’re the hot one in it and he doesn’t know about all the others.

£4.50 from Waitrose

You hate her. She hates you. Your marriage is a sham of icy formality. You will present this card, inside which you grimly note the number of years you have spent together, with a bottle of champagne. She will drink one glass then go to bed while you finish the bottle then move onto gin. Sex is unthinkable, but you can afford to shop at Waitrose.

£2.75 from Co-op

They only have the Co-op where you live and that’s a suitable symbol of your love, because if you’d had more choice you wouldn’t be together. But you didn’t, so you are, and it’s alright you suppose. You like having someone to watch telly with and he’s good at the pub quiz. Why expect more?

£4 from M&S Simply Food

Has the love died in your relationship? You don’t know, you haven’t checked, but you’d assume you’d have noticed the smell and left a note for the cleaner. Going through the motions? Yes, well that’s what life is, isn’t it? They do a very good meal deal here for the big night. Goes well with the mutual oral while thinking of other people later.