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Happy Valentine’s Day Everybody! Or, as Jonathon says, "Happy Day I’m supposed to love you better day."  It does seem like that is the message, doesn’t it? I had flowers delivered to him yesterday.  What kind? Roses, of course, but not red.  Red is too trite, I try for other colors.  This year the roses are pink and peach and a little yellow, all in a mix of vibrant and delicate color play.  It’s a dozen plus, so the vase is fat and full, and it made him get that certain smile.  You know the one, I’m sure your special someone has their own version of that pleased smile.  What, you expected him to be getting me the flowers for today? Stop looking at the supposed gender roles and concentrate on how we interact as a couple.  Yeah, I buy the flowers more often than not and I love, absolutely love, that he enjoys getting them.  One of the reasons I wanted to marry him was that he enjoyed getting flowers at work.  The last guy before Jonathon that I sent flowers to his work, well, he was embarrassed.  The other men gave him a hard time and he told me to never do that again.  So I didn’t, and now I’m with someone who lets me send him flowers as often as I like. 

The last big tour that I went out on by myself was weeks on the road.  He’d given me, at my request one of his shirts that he’d worn so I could sleep in it on the road.  I bought him a big stuffed animal so he’d have something to cuddle up against while I was gone.  At the end of the tour I began to send him roses every day.  I actually arranged it over the phone to have a different color of rose every day with a different line from the Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet 43, "How Do I Love The? Let me count the ways . . ."  So each day they’d deliver the flowers with the card to the main library desk, and the women at the desk would call him up from his basement office to get his flowers.  The first day, they were amused.  The second day, they were sort of amused.  By day three, Jonathon said, they were pretty short on the phone and grumpy.  Why?  Because they were mostly college age girls who were helping woman the desk, so the librarians could do their job.  The girls began to ask themselves, why weren’t they getting flowers from their boyfriends?  The men that worked in the library asked Jonathon, "Man, what did you do to deserve all this?  Why is she buying you flowers?"  His reply, "I love her and everything about her, and she loves me."  This was not the answer they wanted to hear.  They wanted some super secret seduction technique, some line, some thing, that they could duplicate and get that kind of attention, but it doesn’t work that way.

One of the most amusing bits was the day that one of the football player boyfriends of one of the girls in the library decided to get some of his friends to back him up and teach Jonathon a lesson.  He was making the rest of them look bad.  He wanted Jonathon to stop getting flowers from me, or something equally inane.  But when his two jock friends saw whose office they were headed for, they fell back, and he had to talk to my sweetie alone.  Why would two football players be afraid to hassle Joanthon?  Because he was the head of the college’s computer labs.  He was their help desk, and because he wasn’t that much older than some of them, and looked younger, he’d drawn his line in the sand very clear and very deep from the beginning.  If you gave him a hard time your computer requests went to the back of the help line,  no matter the urgency.  If you were actually threatening, you somehow never got computer time, or help, or, well, you get the idea.  When I would visit Jonathon at work, I watched person after person see that the door was closed, Jonathon’s signal to not be interrupted unless it was very important, and the people would look at their paper, look at the door, shake their heads sadly and walk away.  The two football player friends weren’t going to risk it with finals coming up, and all their computer help sitting behind that one door.  The boyfriend came on alone and tried to get up in Jonathon’s face, but his friends’s desertion seemed to unnerve him.  Many bullies need an audience to bluster successfully.  He told Jonathon, "Your girlfriend needs to stop sending you flowers at work.  You’re making the rest of us look bad."  Jonathon told him, "Just buy your girlfriend some flowers.  You can get some for five bucks at Schnucks (a local grocery chain)."

Strangely, though several boyfriends complained to him, though less aggressively, no one just went out and bought their girlfriends some flowers.  It’s funny how many people would rather complain and blame others than do something simple to fix the problem.

Have a great Valentine’s Day, and if your sweetie wants flowers get them flowers; if they’d rather have that socket set, then get them that.  It’s not about what you get your sweetheart, it’s about knowing them well enough to get them something that will earn you that very special smile.