Bring Valentine’s Day Back!
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If you are like me, you dread or have cringed at the holiday many of us celebrate on February the fourteenth. I am not a fan of it. I spent too many by myself feeling extra depressed that nobody would want to be with me. On the other side, when I had someone to share it with, I would inevitably mess it up with either too much or not enough attention put into it. It’s a tightrope many of us walk. It’s a tightrope over a pit of fire breathing gorillas with cobra heads.
Navigating Valentine’s Day is like the opening scene to Raiders of the Lost Ark, where in South America Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones is seeking a golden Native American Idol. He’s immediately almost shot in the back by one of his guides, or in this metaphor, the friend who gives you bad romantic advice.
Then Indy navigates several very cleverly disguised booby traps, or in this case, “Let’s not give Valentine’s gifts this year.” Now this implies that a trap is set on purpose for you to fail. This isn’t the case. It’s a trap that appears because you mistake the term “gift” for gesture. Too many of us hear the phrase, “let’s not give Valentine’s gifts this year” as “completely ignore that Valentine’s Day exists and that everyone around you and your partner are showering each other in expensive baubles.” Mistaking this phrase is the trap. If you fall prey to it, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Doctor Jones then finds himself in front of the idol he has been after, the prize that is going to make everything worthwhile. However, the idol is on an impossibly well engineered, counter-balanced pressure released trigger switch made of stone. If too much or too little pressure is applied to it, the switch will trigger a cataclysmic destruction, causing you to backpedal through the booby traps, tripping every single one, dodging dangerous chunks of cave roof while being… Well, you remember how February 14th went last year.
You wanted to capture a peaceful evening free of expectations. You were polite and successfully walked on eggshells all evening, not calling attention to your partner’s short, cold answers too your questions. As you drift off to sleep, you think you have gotten away with it—avoiding blowing a paycheck on flowers, chocolate and sparkly sparkle bling. You even venture a drowsy, “Happy Valentine’s day baby,” before you turn over and realize that the stone pedestal is sinking into the altar. You have the idol, but the roof is about to come down.
“Oh, is it Valentine’s Day? I thought something was different when every single person I work with started getting flowers and packages delivered to them.”
Hearing the sarcasm, you roll back over to address this situation by explaining you thought it was clear that there was not to be a gift exchange. “We decided we weren’t going to give gifts this year” you say, thinking this is the end of the conversation and your partner just needed to be reminded of this fact and you would be free to pass into sweet, sweet sleep. No.
“No, that’s not what we decided. We decided not to spend money. I didn’t GET you anything, but I don’t expect you to understand the difference between expressing your feelings and trying to buy affection with a heart filled with cheap chocolate.”
“Cheap chocolate? Is this a knock on the chocolates I gave you last year? Those were upper-mid tier chocolates. I went to See’s, not Walgreen’s—SEE’S! And I seem to remember that box being nearly empty the next day, so they couldn’t have been THAT bad.”
“That’s because your dog ate them off the table.”
“That’s why Buck died, isn’t it? You poisoned him!”
“Technically, YOU bought the chocolates! You left them on the table! I chose not to eat them because they were terrible. You killed Buck! Those were lower mid-tier at best and really—See’s over Walgreen’s? That’s like arguing Denny’s over McDonald’s. Here’s a hint, when looking for quality, avoid businesses with apostrophe’s in the name.”
At this point, you have just created an argument that is going to keep you awake for at least another two hours and twenty minutes. You probably hear words that include (but not limited to): responsibility, disrespect, inappropriate, the name of your co-worker, ashamed, laundry, unfair, sharing, the name of your ex, profoundly, nauseous, slime, smelly, disrespect (I know I already listed it, but you’re going to hear it a lot), cheap, pig, jerk, toilet, feelings chores and disappointment. If you’re lucky, after the two hours and twenty minutes of back and forth, you MIGHT be allowed to apologize.
(Under no circumstances, no matter how late it is or how tired either of you are, no matter how much you did that day, no matter how early you have to be up the next, no matter how sick you may be feeling, DO NOT FALL ASLEEP WHILE THESE WORDS ARE BEING SPOKEN TOO YOU! The fight clock starts over when your partner figures out you fell asleep. If you fall asleep with one minute to go, the clock starts over with two hours and twenty minutes, plus an extra half hour if they found out by hearing you snore.)
This isn’t your partner being cruel; this is you being all those things listed in the rant from your partner. And seriously, See’s? Come on. See’s isn’t what you give the love of your life. It’s what the marching band sells when they need new uniforms. Be better than See’s.
What your partner was looking for in the above dramatization, not at all drawn from the author’s experiences, was the gesture, not the gift. Your partner may have implied no gifts, meaning little money being spent, but that was probably less about finances and more about trying to get you to express yourself in a new and interesting way.
Your partner probably made your Valentine’s Day card using materials taken from your life and crafted a beautiful, folded-paper literary experience. They created a card defining the furthest reaches of their love for you while carefully matching the color scheme to those of both your eyes (if they are a little hippy-ish, your aura too). They may have written you a poem, where they try to rhyme “indemnity” with “Persephone,” but at least they TRIED!
Does your significant other expect the exact same thing from you? NO. They only expect the tiniest bit of effort.
If you were to play their favorite song and do a choreographed dance to it, you would get credit, because it proved you spent time on in. (You may need to prove that you didn’t make up the dance on the spot, so you’ll have to have video footage of you doing the same dance or extensive parts of the same dance filmed in a different location.)
A Valentine’s Day card is only going to get you partial credit. The words in them are pretty, but they aren’t yours. They don’t tell your story. Off-the-rack cards should be used as an enhancement or as a last resort only. Buy a blank card and fill it with even the clunkiest of affectionate feelings and you’ll be ahead of the game. Otherwise you may be stuck with what some other sap wrote to a generic partner deep in the Hallmark pretty-prose lab.
I’m going to narrow this down to husbands and the types of cards offered for them to give to their sweethearts. These cards are written to make you look terrible. They make you appear emotionally distant and shallow. These cards typically begin with an awkward confession to being a terrible communicator in your relationship. A typical passage from a man to a woman in Valentine’s Day card form reads like this:
I know I don’t always express my feelings toward you in words.
It’s never been easy for me to share my emotions.
But all year long, every minute of every hour,
You are in my thoughts, my dreams and my plans for our future.
So if I don’t say often enough,
Know today and every day that I love you.
This translates to:
The less we talk, the better I like it.
The quiet, dangerously mysterious man you were first attracted to is actually pretty dull.
We’ve been together a year, but I realized today was Valentine’s Day only this morning,
I needed to prove to you that I didn’t forget. Oh, and that getting engaged thing is back on the table.
I don’t say what you want to hear enough,
“I love you,” and please note that I wrote the word “Love” in cursive above where I wrote my name.
Every single one of us can do better than these cards. We can do better than chocolate or flowers. We can take Valentine’s Day back!
First of all, don’t blow a bunch of money on dinner, unless that’s something you both find fun and relaxing. Don’t do it because you think it would be romantic though. If you want to have dinner together, MAKE dinner together; make something you’ve never had before and have fun with it. The key ingredient is TIME (not to be confused with thyme, the herb, although it may too be a key ingredient).
Write a letter to your better half. Include your feelings for them, your hopes for them and remind them of how amazing they are and you are. Don’t include a coupon for sex (not even if you think 10% off is extremely clever).
Find a way to give your partner more time. Give them time to relax, a nap, a night out with a friend or an hour with a good book while you do the task they were going to do. You could be with them or away from them. If they want too much time away from you then…
Find out what charity your significant other is passionate about, especially if you AREN’T passionate about it and commit to volunteering a week of honest work for the charity. This will show your mate that you truly do understand the things that are important to them, and you will demonstrate your love and show them that you support them down to their soul. This works awesome as a last minute idea for when you truly screwed up. If presented correctly even during a two hour fight, you could cut the time down significantly. It works better if you’ve printed something out about the charity so it shows forethought though.
I’m sure you can come up with more original ideas to put the love and feeling back into Valentine’s Day.
This Valentine’s Day I feel I need to express my love for my wife in a better way. Because we now value time more in our relationship apart, the greatest gifts I can give to her is clear understanding and to make every moment count. I’m going to try to build a better plan for loving my wife through the year using some of these ideas. I’m probably not going to write her a letter though. That’s stupid. We live in the same house sometimes.
You needn’t feel frightened about Valentine’s Day anymore. If you want to know real pressure, my wife’s birthday is the Day before Valentine’s Day. There’s no way I’m going to get two days right in a row, and that’s the Damm truth.