Will You Be My Valentine?

 

The sweet gift my husband made me for Valentine's.
I love it!

Yesterday was the Day of Love. Some people hate it. Some people love it. Some people have weird expectations around it. I've come to love Valentine's Day and this was long before I got married. I spent many years in my 20s without a significant other on Valentine's. However, that experience taught me to look outside of our culture's hyperfocus on romantic love and appreciate the other types of love in my life: Good friends, family, and working on my own self-love. I would get my roommates as well as myself valentines gifts back then. I've been known to still buy myself flowers when I feel like it. 

This year was an interesting Valentine's because my husband and I are exhausted. It happens when parenting young children, plus the heaviness that life sometimes brings. In all honesty, I did more for our kids to celebrate Valentine's than my own husband. We tend to make this day a family event. However, when Danny and I exchanged cards, we both couldn't help laughing. Both of the cards we got each other said something along the lines of: "Thank you for hanging in there with me" or "We are making it through the thick and thin". There was this acknowledgment of the hard, which generally doesn't come in the gushy cards. In the little note Danny wrote me, he even ended it with: "We will survive this." I have to say, as much as I like words of affirmation and being told sweet things, that was quite possibly the most loving thing he could say. The validation that things have been kind of rough lately and that we were in this together. It was the reminder I needed.

I read this article recently about the expectations we put on love and relationships and how it is ruining those very relationships. I couldn't help but nod along. No partner will be perfect. No life will be complete because of someone else. There will always be pros and cons. There will always be hard stuff and fun stuff. Sometimes one will outweigh the other. I couldn't help but think how grateful I was for a valentines card that said "We will survive this", because isn't that the whole point of a partnership? I think so.