I have commemorated forty-plus Valentine’s Days, and frankly, since graduating from grade school, most have left very little to be desired. So this year, I have decided to forgo celebrating the holiday altogether.

I think it’s a rather smart decision on my part. Unlike Christmas or birthdays, February 14th is expected to be the one day the Love of Your Life gets to express his or her undying affection for you. It’s as if every other day of the year is merely a gesture. And if your significant other blows it? Man, that spells nothing but Trouble-with-a-capital-T in the House of Love.

We women, especially, seem to set ourselves up for a broken heart every February. We are typically our harshest critics anyway, weighing and measuring our very worth by how others treat us, so the perceived wrong gift or card has the potential to set us up for a terrible fall off the Ladder of Self Esteem. (What? A vacuum cleaner? You thought I’d like a vacuum cleaner for Valentine’s Day? What am I to you…your mother?)

Still worse is no gift or card at all. (Unless, of course, you choose to go the same route as I. See? Smart.)

I have been married for more than twenty years, and I long ago gave up trying to figure out if my husband and I are each other’s “soul mates.” I do know, however, I am Jane-o to his Wes-o, and he not only “gets” me, he loves me anyway. And I, him. We prove it to each other every day. Ours is not a perfect love–I don’t believe there is such a thing–but it’s ours. We no longer have to profess our love for each other with trinkets or love notes as dictated by the grocery store aisle of Hallmark greeting cards. Instead, we demonstrate our love in more tangible ways. Who else will nurse him through the flu, or post his resume on line, or keep the house quiet while he naps? Who else will teach me how to drive, or hold me through my tears, or dance with me on the kitchen floor? We make each other coffee and wash each other’s dirty laundry, and if that’s not love, then I don’t know what it is.

And when we forget to remember these things, which occasionally we do, what better reminder is there than our two children, proof positive that we reap what we sow in the Game of Love?

I’m not anti-Valentine’s Day, and I wish for everyone who celebrates it a heart-filled day of love professed and renewed. But in my house, it will be just another day, same as today, same as next week, next month, next year.

Happy Second Thursday in February, 2008!

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