Writing Prompts
A No-Pressure Valentine’s Day
With presence, without expectations
I’ve always enjoyed the kid-friendly parts of Valentine’s Day: craft supplies, characters on the store-bought valentines, phrases on conversation heart candies….
This year I found a cute heart-shaped stuffed animal to give my former foster daughter while browsing with my girlfriend at Ikea. Is it still a stuffed animal if it’s a heart? It has arms that you can Velcro together to hold something like a little bag of chocolates or one of those chocolate-covered marshmallow hearts.
Though she’s reached pre-teen territory now, my former foster daughter and I still like to shop for tiny gifts she can give her classmates, like themed erasers. In fact, I’m picking her up from school today, and we have an open offer standing to put together some valentines for her friends, so we’ll see what she wants to do.
The parts of Valentine’s Day about romantic partnership have been more challenging for me. I think a lot of people feel an undercurrent of expectation that you do the “perfect” thing for your partner. And sometimes the pressure is more overt.
When my ex-wife and I were dating, we broke up in early January one year, and we weren’t together that Valentine’s Day. We got back together within a few months, and I was informed that the following Valentine’s Day, I needed to “make it up to [her]” and take her to her favorite restaurant.
I guess that strong-arming or score-keeping must come from some deep emotional place of expectation as well as disappointment. She was disappointed that I hadn’t returned to our relationship sooner, and when things resolved between us, they weren’t totally resolved because I was given some expectations to fulfill to demonstrate my feelings of contrition and commitment.
Love and valentines and relationships — for most of my adult life, this mostly centered on what someone else expected of me. These days I’m working on a great un-learning of push and pull, and pressure and expectation. And this is happening alongside a relearning about mutuality.
For Valentine’s Day this year, my girlfriend is taking time off work, and I’m bringing a laptop to keep up with my online students, and we’re having our first vacation together. We’ve had an overnight getaway twice before, but this is the first time we’re taking a longer break to relax.
The trip is our gift to each other. We chose the destination and the hotel together. She bought a Costco-sized amount of sunscreen while shopping with her sister, telling her that “Amanda has never seen the sun.” I bought some easy-to-carry snacks from the organic grocery store.
So we’re all set, except for packing and traveling and getting situated beside the pool in a spot with a combo of sun and shade that will suit both of us.
If you don’t hear from me next week, well, I’m probably taking an afternoon nap with a crossword puzzle book left open across my lap while my girlfriend does the same, having caught up with the latest in People.
Thanks to Ellie for her Freewriting Friday prompt about February 14. It fit with some thoughts I’ve had lately regarding getting older and how this can be a source of frustration, but at the same time we do gain wisdom and greater capacity to treat others and ourselves in ways that are more supportive and sustainable.