[Estimated reading time: 8 minutes]

People...I love Valentines Day. I’m not afraid to say it. From the forced mating rituals by our corporate overlords, to the increased pollen production that makes my hayfevery eyes romantically red, and even the inundation of cutesy twee animals holding anatomically incorrect hearts declaring their “wuv” for me. I love it all!

And that’s why I’m giving you, dear readers, a Valentine’s Day gift! Today you shall receive a review of a product that I felt most embodied the Valentine’s Day spirit. I would go so far as to say that if Saint Valentine himself had taken a momentary break from being persecuted by Romans, he would have endorsed this product personally.

Say hello to the Evolved Romance Collection! Now imagine it saying hello back, because otherwise this feels like a one-sided conversation with an inanimate tin of sex toys.

Evolved is a well-known brand that manufactures a number of products, several of which they have shoehorned into this fancy pink collector's tin (which you just know you’re going to store biscuits in later).

From the moment I opened this glorious trove of romantic catnip I knew I was in for a special V-Day. For what did I see before me but rose petals! And not the kind that are inconveniently attached to an actual rose either. No, these magnificent constructions were 100% fake, complete with a delightfully scratchy texture that I knew would be sticking to my naked body very soon. These allegedly “silk” petals were just what my sheets had been pining for and I scattered them dutifully about. Admittedly since there were only about twelve in the packet it looked like a particularly anaemic rose had recently been dead headed over the middle of my bed, but that wasn’t the point. It’s all about the spirit of dead a Christian Saint damnit!

I returned to my Evolved Romance Collection to see what other ambience inducing tidbits they’d supplied me with. To my delight I discovered not one, but two lovely tea lights. And again, not one to cheap out, Evolved wasn’t satisfied with the usual wax and wick fare, no they demanded cutting edge technology! So I stared down at two plastic, LED tea light candles. Apparently they required watch batteries to operate. No one has watch batteries. So I romantically requested from my partner that my Valentine’s Day gift be watch batteries. I am now one of those people that owns watch batteries. And the LED candles that use them. Turns out that in the pursuit of realism, Evolved also demanded that their electronic candles flicker. This is A) Not good for epileptics and B) Not great if you’ve turned off all of your other lights and are stumbling around trying to find your Romance Collection in the dark, ending up feeling like Ray Charles at a rave.

I finally stumbled into the light and back to my Romance Collection tin. The mood was set, my lover had just wandered in and demanded to know why it looked like our bedroom was hosting a very depressed discotheque. I patiently informed them that it was Valentine’s Day and where the hell was their dead Christian Saint spirit? I decided to get them into the mood by unwrapping the deck of 52 Love Vouchers. Surely no one could go past a romantic coupon for sexual services? I eagerly fished one out from the middle of the deck and handed it to my paramour.

“One free blowjob?”

I looked down at the coupon. That was what it said.

“Yes.”

“From who?”

“Well me…I guess.”

“Do I have to use it now? Or can I save it for when you have a headache?”

As a fiscal conservative it made sense to me that my partner would want to invest their sexual savings and earn interest on the deposit. Their financial foresight turned me on immensely and I pushed them up against the wall.

“Oh you can save it! You can save it and I’ll give you manually stimulated dividends every quarter!”

“Oh baby, I didn’t know you were high yield.”

Clearly the dead Christian Saint had gotten into my lover and we were finally on the same page.

I looked again into the Romance Collection. It was time to step this up a bit. I was breaking out the big guns, the Love Dice! These adventurous gambling apparatus had been modified so one die had body parts listed on each side and the other had sexy actions. I was going to, in a completely random combination, ravish my partner’s body.

“Roll them,” they said huskily. So I did.

“Massage…Lips?”

“Uuuuuuh…I don’t want that.”

We rolled again.

“Squeeze…Neck”

Knowing for a fact that neither of us were big fans of auto-erotic asphyxiation, we shrugged sadly and rolled again.

“Touch…Toes”

My partner poked my toe with a finger. For some reason I wasn’t overwhelmed by the waves of romantic lust I’d expected.

I regarded the dice with a skeptical eye. Clearly these were loaded dice, intended for a gambling den somewhere before mistakenly ending up in my Romance Collection.

Never mind, there was still plenty more I could do. Including, it turned out, Vajazzle myself! I eagerly sequestered myself in the bathroom and began applying the tiny sexualised diamantes.

What shape should I do? An arrow? A star? *gasp* Of course, a heart!

However as I began applying I realised that the Vajazzle instructions had missed one important detail. I suspected that sticking sparkly things onto my crotch might have gone slightly easier if I’d shaved first. I now had some seriously sparkly pubes that made my genitals feel like Lady Lovely Locks.

I emerged, radiantly from the bathroom.

“What do you think?” I demanded, romantically.

My partner regarded my bedazzled crotch mop for a moment before declaring, “It’s like if Rainbow Brite sold a range of merkins.”

Shattered by this 80's nostalgia betrayal I jumped onto the bed and pulled the Romance Collection toward me.

We needed to up the romance, and fast! I grabbed the first thing that came to hand, a bottle of edible lube.

“Ooooh, I love this stuff!” my lover declared enthusiastically, “It tastes like the good brand of cough syrup!”

I wasn’t one to argue with top shelf cough suppressant so I obediently flopped backwards and let my partner glaze my crotch like a Christmas ham and then squeaked in surprised pleasure as they began to devour my cough-syrupy goodness.

Apparently my partner really like cough syrup. They really liked it for a good five minutes or more before finally emerging for air. Which was when I realised that preceding oral sex with hirsute vajazzling might not have been the best way to order things.

I was staring at the closest embodiment to Edward from Twilight. My partner’s face was glistening, not just with flavoured lube and my own lubricated excitement, but also with at least a dozen sporadic diamantes.

Before I could recommend any aesthetic remedial efforts however, my lover excitedly grabbed the Romance Collection and pulled out the “Romance Enhancing Vibrating Ring.”

I looked at the packaging. “Romance Enhancing”…was this finally going to be the V-Day I dreamed of? My partner quickly scanned the packaging “Look, it recommends putting it on my tongue!”

I shrugged, I was still covered in cough-syrup lube, why not.

For a few moments I experienced a pleasantly vibrational oral sex endeavor from my partner, before there was a loud “Aaaaaah” followed by something sharp hitting my exposed crotch.

“What?!” I asked leaping up.

“Da Vibwator, it chipped my toof!”

Sure enough, upon fishing into my cough-syrupy vaj, there was a tooth fragment hiding within. Vagina dentata indeed!

My partner and I stared at each other. Me spread eagled, holding a tooth in the light of my epileptically lit bedroom, and them with a palm held against a partially vajazzled face.

We smiled at each other. Yes. We’d finally done it. We’d lived up to the true spirit of Valentine’s Day.

That is all.

You may go now.