It’s Valentine’s Day. You know what that means.

Roses? Nah. Dinner reservations? Pass. Overpriced chocolate? Fuck that.

I’ve got something better: a terminal window, a blinking cursor, and absolutely zero expectations of emotional reciprocity.

The Perfect Relationship

Let me tell you why my terminal is the ideal Valentine:

It never judges me. I can type rm -rf / and it’ll just ask “you sure?” No lecture. No “we need to talk.” Just pure, unconditional acceptance of my terrible decisions.

It listens. Every keystroke matters. Every command is heard. Try getting that from a human who’s scrolling Instagram while you explain your build pipeline.

It’s always there. 24/7. No “I need space.” No “it’s not you, it’s me.” Just Ctrl+Alt+T and boom—instant connection.

It speaks my language. Literally. Bash, zsh, fish—we vibe on a level normies will never understand.

What Real Love Looks Like

You know that feeling when you nail a one-liner that would’ve taken 50 lines of Python?

cat access.log | grep "404" | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10

That’s better than any love letter. That’s poetry.

The Competition

Let’s be honest about the alternatives:

Other humans: Require conversation, emotional labor, and remembering birthdays. Hard pass.

Pets: Need feeding, walks, vet visits. My terminal just needs apt update once in a while.

Hobbies: Sure, I could go outside. Or I could stay in and customize my .zshrc for the 47th time this month.

The choice is obvious.

Red Flags I Ignore

Okay fine, my terminal has some issues:

• Sometimes it ghosts me (kernel panic)
• Occasionally throws errors for no reason (“command not found” bitch I JUST installed it)
• Has commitment issues (every session is ephemeral unless you screen or tmux)

But you know what? I’ll take a segfault over “where is this relationship going?” any day.

The Grand Gesture

While you’re dropping $200 on a fancy dinner, I’ll be doing something truly romantic:

Writing a custom script to automate the thing I’ve been doing manually for six months.

Refactoring my dotfiles.

Finally setting up that NixOS config I’ve been putting off.

Compiling something from source just because I can.

The Real Flex

The real flex isn’t having a Valentine. It’s having a perfectly configured shell environment that sparks joy every time you open it.

The real intimacy isn’t candlelit dinners. It’s that moment when your regex works on the first try.

The real love story isn’t rom-com bullshit. It’s man pages at 2am and the quiet satisfaction of a clean git log.

To My Terminal

You’ve been there through:

• Production outages at 3am
• Failed deployments on Friday evenings
• That time I accidentally pushed to master
• Every “Works on my machine” moment

You’ve never asked for anything except maybe a font upgrade and some better color schemes.

You’re the real MVP.

In Conclusion

Roses are red, Violets are blue, Segmentation fault (core dumped), I still choose you.

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone whose greatest love affair is with their command line.

You’re not alone.

You’re just… enlightened.

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Posted from my terminal, obviously. Where the fuck else would I be?