By: Revanche

Taking a pass: Valentine’s Day

February 2, 2015

The Frugalwoods beat me to this topic. 🙂

I was on Twitter bragging on PiC, as usual, the other weekend.

This time it was because he made me breakfast in bed. No reason. The night before, he’d asked if I wanted to put in my breakfast order, and in response to my “You must be joking” face, he wrote up an awesome “room service menu”.  He not only promptly fulfilled that breakfast order in the morning, he went to run errands so I could rest and then came home bearing the gifts of cinnamon rolls from a specialty grocery that Linda had just recommended on Twitter that very morning. Note: I’d just mentioned that it’d be nice to look out for them. That wasn’t a coded hint.

After I shared this, she jokingly said if we were on reality TV, I’d be the target for some good old fashioned catfighting.

Naturally I had to escalate the bragging and point out he’s not just this awesome to me but also to my good friends. He’s great about taking care of them as if they were his friends first when they’re visiting and as Exhibit A, called in SingleMa to attest to his awesome… only that backfired as she confessed to liking him better than she likes me. HARUMPH! He’s not even ON Twitter and Twitter is always on his side. Oh, to be so charmed.

[I’d say charming but I can’t characterize him as such since there’s some connotation in my head of that being a conscious effort or an intentional thing that is cultivated and the very charm of his wonderfulness is his consideration of others is sincere and instinctive and not at all calculated.]

But it warms my cold shriveled heart enough that I can almost forgive the fact that they’re always siding with or defending him on Twitter when I jokingly fight with him.

What’s my point? Other than the fact that I highly appreciate my fantastic spouse?

Valentine’s Day is coming up and, as usual, it will be observed in my traditionally avoid-it-entirely manner.

For one thing, it’s a Hallmark holiday. For another, wasting money on an overpriced meal out, flowers, and unnecessary gifts do not spell out L-O-V-E.

Forcing the fake romance is a surefire tactic to irritate the crap out of me:
First, by making me get dressed and leave the house. I choose to be a hermit for a reason.
Second, wasting time trying to park in the city because that’s always an exercise in not lobbing Molotov cocktails at horrible drivers. Mentally of course…. Just mentally…
Third, wasting money! Oooh the sin of wasting money! Money that could be buying me more comic books or another set of stocks.
Fourth, you can’t buy a healthy relationship. There’s nothing broken in a relationship that a Valentine’s dinner will fix. Just like marriage isn’t a bandaid for a relationship with commitment problems, Valentine’s Day isn’t the secular version of rogue Catholics selling indulgences. This doesn’t solve anything.

When everything is well, when you’ve put in the hard work to build a healthy relationship, there’s nothing a dozen dozen roses can say that a single one wouldn’t say just as eloquently.

I’ve said before, the truest path to my heart is not through opening the wallet, but through the little things that say you’re in this, together and wholeheartedly, whether that’s in a semi-crappy hotel room or safe and snug at home.

This time last year, we were a different and smaller family, soon to find out we were going to become parents to a wee human.

This time many years ago, we had just discovered each other, embarking on the start of a long road hand in hand.

This time many years hence, I hope we’ll be enjoying the fruits of our labor, with pride in our accomplishments: a happy healthy family, reflecting on meaningful careers, secure in our finances.

What is your Valentine’s (or anti-Valentine’s) wish and tradition?

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