All this love on Facebook and Instagram leading up to Valentine’s Day has me reminiscing on the early days of my marriage. Back when we were young and wild and free.
Oh my gosh it was the worst.
It was September of 2012, my husband’s first birthday since we had been married was coming up, and as a newlywed I really wanted to knock it out of the park. We were living out West at the time, and since my husband is a Jersey Boy, I thought it would be a brilliant idea to fly East for a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. (I can hear you all booing through the Wi-Fi.)
I called his uncle, asked if we could stay, found a perfect weekend for it, and checked flights (but didn’t buy, just in case). And then I bought the tickets for the game.
When Dear Darling Husband got home that night I was about to burst with excitement. I have a surprise, I said. You’re going to love it, I said.
I put on Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” and had Dashing Devilishly Handsome Husband close his eyes. When he opened them, he had in his hand two pieces of paper rolled up, tied with a bow.
“Open it!”
With a sheepish look on his face, he slowly unrolled the tickets, read the writing, and his little grin slowly turned to mortification.
“What is this?”
“What do you think it is?!? It’s tickets to a game!”
“What were you thinking? Did you buy flights already? Where did you get these from? How much did these cost? You can’t just go making big plans like this without talking to me first, there’s no way we’re going…”
And in my mind the rest of the conversation is us yelling, the screen goes blurry, fades to black, and ends with the sound of me slamming the door and taking my super-mature bicycle out for a reckless speed race around the neighborhood, only to end up back on our front lawn, bawling my eyes out.
Oh, birth control hormones.
Thus began my lifelong plight of figuring out how to give gifts in a relationship where our gift-giving expectations don’t match up.
The problem is, in my family, Christmas and other holidays were often punctuated with one of my parents giving something thoughtful and unexpected to the other. A car that was secretly saved up for, a remodeled kitchen, just the right thing that took tons of thought and tons of preparation.
Deliberate Delineated Dull Husband comes from a background of More More More. He also likes to pick out exactly what he wants. So in our single-income family, he pretty much buys himself gifts.
So with Valentine’s coming up, I’m still at a loss of what to get him. We’ve argued about what is more important: Valentine’s or our anniversary. He says Valentine’s. I say our anniversary.
So he’ll be buying me something for Valentine’s Day, and I’ll make him a homemade card and tape some leftover Halloween candy to it.
For our anniversary, I’ll spend months preparing something useful and sentimental, and he’ll wake up that morning, go to work, and then later say, “Hey, should I bring Chinese home?”
In a marriage relationship, these “oversights” on the parts of our partners can really cut deep. They can make us want to scream and go do something drastic because, “HOW CAN HE NOT SEE HOW IMPORTANT THIS DAY IS TO ME?… I mean US!?”
This year, I’m trying to make my thoughts verbal, instead of expecting him to automatically know what I want.
And if I’m lucky, I’ll coax out of him how he imagines Valentine’s Day going down (I can already guess at some of it).
It’s the worst trying to figure these things out. But in the end, I guess it’s worth it because what we are celebrating is our spouse, and we should try to love those spouses in the way they feel most loved.
So Delightful Devoted Husband, if you’re reading this, I’d really like to get my ring cleaned and go out to Cheesecake Factory sans children. Thanks.
Have any gift-giving horror stories? What are you doing for V-Day this year?
