Send a Valentine’s Day e-card to your friend, ex, booty call, and more!

Friend love, friends with benefits, and ex-turned-friends Valentine's Day cards

Looking for a Valentine’s Day card for a special someone in your life who doesn’t fit neatly into a little Hallmark-approved box in the romantic-industrial complex? You don’t say! Me too. Thankfully, everyone’s favorite sex ed site, Scarleteen, has got us covered. The site explains:

There’s a big range of interactions and relationships that can all be healthy, happy and involve love — or like, lust, or even I-don’t-know-yet-what-this-is-yet-but-it-sure-is-fun-so-far — not just one kind of relationship. Hookups or friends with benefits, open or poly relationships, friendships, sexual monogamy, love relationships without sex, exes turned friends, and even the love relationship one has with oneself can all potentially be sweet, caring, beneficial and meaningful for the people within them.

Last year, Samhita launched her Occupy Valentine’s Day Tumblr as a way to “rethink love and romance to resemble who we are, as singles, couples and community”–a mission I really support. Just because Valentine’s Day has come to be associated with the most traditional displays of heteronormative, romantic love doesn’t mean it can’t be a time to honor all the many different kinds of relationships that bring joy to our lives. (Yeah, unlike Samhi, I don’t even pretend that I don’t get totally corny about this stuff.)

Check out more great cards at Scarleteen, and do consider giving them a donation–they do really important work. And if you’re looking for more in the “I-don’t-know-yet-what-this-is-yet-but-it-sure-is-fun-so-far” genre, I also totally loved these cards for your casual hook-up at BuzzFeed.

Maya DusenberyMaya Dusenbery is an Executive Director of Feministing.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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