i *love* valentine’s day.
radar online
don’t get me wrong. i don’t expect much. i can’t, with my dating record. my high-school boyfriend felt it was appropriate to provide me with half a bottle of vodka for such occasions, the other half reserved of course for him. later i experienced three valentine’s days with a boy who, without fail, presented me with a card he’d hand-scrawled on scrap paper on the bus on his way to my house, with a bold declaration on the inside, always the same: “IOU 1 ice-cream cake”. once he even got the year wrong, though it isn’t even necessary to put the year on the front of the card (his defense was that it was february and the year had just begun). and after we broke up, the next guy i dated broke up with me exactly a week before valentine’s day but still came over to spend some time with me.
so let’s just say i don’t have the highest of standards. but these past boyfriends all had one very important thing in common: they all went into the experience with the best intentions. from the heart, you could say. i never saw that ice-cream cake, even after three and a half years of dating. i don’t have a closet full of old gifts somewhere, but a shoebox full of lovely “hand-made” cards. i don’t have a drawer full of expensive jewelery, but a hilarious and heart-warming collection of memories.
this silly valentine’s-day past of mine doesn’t just have something to offer me, either. it also offers my current boyfriend, matt, the absolute impossibility of fucking it up. he can do no wrong. he could text me “happy valentine’s day” and it would be enough to satisfy my expectations.
this year, though, i do expect a little something. matt and i have had a rough month or so, and it would be nice to spend some quality time together. i’d like to go out to the movies and see valentine’s day, partially because it reminds me of love actually and partially because it has everyone in it and that excites me. i’m going to be working most of the weekend and cleaning when i’m not at work, but i think we can find some time around all that to just be together.
the fire left us without the kind of money we’d normally have to give each other gifts or go out for the evening, so we’ll see what happens. but it really comes down to what i read in a text this morning, “oh well. a few decades before i was born, this nice british chap told me that all you need is love.”
