Be Careful With Valentine’s Day, It Will Pay Dividends For Years

Be Careful With Valentine’s Day, It Will Pay Dividends For Years.

It wasn’t too far into my marriage that I realized Valentine’s Day is not to be taken lightly, definitely never ignored and should be heightened to the level of anniversary’s and birthdays and maybe slightly higher.

This is the one day you express deep love in creative ways, be tested for such creativity and (for better or worse) measured for it. What!? You thought it was just a reason to go out to dinner in February (and the fact you actually got a reservation 2 weeks in advance was being creative)?

Nope, not even close.

Here’s the skinny.

We were young, maybe eight years into our marriage living in our first home in Sugarhouse. Each year I had felt her disappointment in my Valentine’s Day effort so this year I was determined to get it right.

I started easily a month in advance, prepared a menu (to this point, I wasn’t too involved in cooking), planned the music, setting, gifts and a special gift (which I learned is vital).

Day of; started with flowers in the morning on the doorstep with her favorite chocolate. She was thrilled, thought that was it for the day but I showed back up at noon with her favorite treat (at that time it was Bakers d’ Normandie in Holladay). Gave her a personal note of my favorite memory of our time together, which I have to be honest gave us both tears of joy …now that could have easily been it (I felt her starting to be pleased with my effort) but I was determined this year to not disappoint.

I got home from the office (yes, in the mortgage business) about 2:30 with my planned menu, donned an apron (at this time a huge surprise) and got busy on my special meal. This was where a ‘ton’ of creativity came into play. I learned that was a way I hadn’t previously tapped into in expressing love; taking pride in the kitchen both through helping to plan and prepare meals and cleaning up fully afterward was truly a way to my wife’s heart.

One of the items I prepared that night has become a family tradition, one actually of many from my lesson learned that the kitchen was the way I could help her more than any other. That meal had such an impact that from that Valentine’s Day forward I took the lead role in managing the kitchen, meal preparation, clean up, grocery shopping the whole works and have learned to love cooking because of the sheer joy it brought my wife that night and now 27 years since.

By the way, the special gift I gave her that night at our dinner (candle-lit table set up in our bedroom to keep our kids from running all over us – it was so fun) was something that cost nothing but showed my heart …I got a neat looking rock, painted it white and wrote a poem on it expressing sweet romantic words of love I also learned she yearned to hear.

So many lessons learned that night, changed our lives forever (mainly mine), the special rock still sits on our shelves today and as much time as I’ve spent in the kitchen has become a way into the hearts of my children and grandchildren and definitely the way I most express my love helping around the house for a tired, young (now old) wife and mother whom I love deeply who needed creative ways of expressing love (working to make her life a little easier).

May your Valentine’s Day be so life changing.