I was standing in a Target on the first Saturday of February, holding a wicker basket that said Be Mine in glitter glue, when I realized the holiday has lost its mind.
The end-cap was a wall of red velvet. A bear in a tiny tuxedo. Another bear holding a heart that said I Wuv You — that is the actual spelling, on a $49.99 bear, marketed at adults. Boxes of chocolates shaped like hearts but also somehow like internal organs. A mug that read World's Okayest Boyfriend, which I will admit made me laugh, and which I almost bought for Frank as a joke before remembering that Frank does not understand jokes purchased from a Target end-cap. He understands jokes I make at the breakfast table. He does not understand mugs.
I put the basket back. I bought a bag of mini Reese's and a card that said nothing in particular, and I walked out into the parking lot thinking about who, exactly, this holiday is sold to. Because it isn't sold to me. I have been married to Frank Sinclair for 47 years. I have had 47 Valentine's Days with the same man, and I can tell you that none of them looked anything like the Target display.
What Long-Married Couples Actually Do (When Nobody's Looking)
Here is what Valentine's Day looks like in a house where the same two people have been making coffee for each other since the Carter administration. Frank wakes up at 6:15 AM regardless of the calendar. He goes to play golf, also regardless of the calendar. I drink coffee on the patio and read a mystery novel. At some point in the late afternoon he comes home with a single carnation, because the florist near the Safeway only does the cheap ones now and Frank refuses to drive across town for the good ones. The carnation is usually pink. Once it was yellow, which is not a Valentine's color, but the cashier rang it up anyway and Frank did not argue, because Frank does not argue with cashiers.
We make dinner at home. We have been making dinner at home on Valentine's Day for about thirty years, ever since the year we tried to go to a restaurant in Wilmette and waited an hour and forty minutes for a table because half the suburb had the same idea. We know how each other likes the pasta cooked. He knows I like the sauce a little thinner than he does. I know he wants the parmesan grated, not shaken from a green can. These are not romantic facts. They are the residue of thousands of dinners. But on February 14th, when everyone on the internet is being told to plan an unforgettable evening, the residue is the entire point.
We watch an old movie. Charade. His Girl Friday. The Thin Man, which we have seen twelve times and which Frank still snorts at when Nick Charles mixes the martinis. Frank does not know I notice the snort. I notice it every time.
Last year, after the Desert Botanical Garden dragged us through a succulent exhibit at my insistence, Frank stopped in the gift shop on the way out and bought me a watercolor print of a saguaro. He did not say it was for Valentine's Day. He did not say it was for anything. It's hanging behind my desk now. He has never mentioned it again. That is what Valentine's Day looks like at this house: a man who expresses love in a gift shop and then never speaks of it, which is either maddening or the most romantic thing I have ever experienced, depending on the day.
If you are reading this and have been married for 30, 40, 50 years, you already know all of this. You know that the best Valentine's Day involves no reservations, no $49.99 bears, and possibly no acknowledgment of the date itself beyond the carnation. You know that the people writing those Hallmark ads have never had to negotiate which side of the bed is whose for four decades.
The Greeting Cards Are Worse Than You Remember
Can we talk about greeting cards for a minute? Because I taught English for 34 years and I have read approximately 30,000 student essays, and the writing in the Valentine's section at CVS is somehow worse than the worst tenth-grader I ever graded.
To my one and only. (To whom else would you be writing it?)
I love you more today than yesterday. (A measurable claim, presented without evidence.)
You are my everything. (Frank is not my everything. Frank is my husband. My everything also includes my children, my mystery novels, my coffee, the dermatologist who removed that spot on my forearm in 2019, and a strong feeling about how to load a dishwasher.)
Happy Valentine's Day to my soulmate. (We met at a barbecue in 1977. He was wearing a button-down shirt and Sperrys. There was no soul-recognition. There was, however, a deviled egg.)
The cards are bad. The poetry is worse. There is a whole category of cards now that are just photographs of dogs with text overlaid, which I do not understand and refuse to engage with. Buy a blank card. Write something yourself. Write something embarrassing. Write the smallest true thing, I still like you or Thank you for the carnation, and you will have produced more love-content than every card in that aisle combined.
For 34 years I told teenagers that specific is always better than general. The thing he said on Tuesday beats all your wonderful qualities every time. It turns out this is true at 72 also.
For Anyone Who Is Spending the Day Alone
A Pew Research analysis found that about 56% of Americans 65 to 74 are married, which means a meaningful share of us are not — by choice, by widowhood, by the slow drift of a long life. If you are spending February 14th alone this year, the worst thing you can do is treat it like a problem that needs solving. The next-worst thing is treating it like a self-care opportunity, which is a phrase invented by people trying to sell you something.
Here is what actually works:
Call someone you haven't called in a while. Not your kids — they will assume something is wrong. Call the friend you keep meaning to. Call your sister. Call the cousin who sends you the Christmas letter every year with photos of her dogs. The bar is low. I was thinking about you, that's all — that is the whole call. Twenty minutes, and you've done more for human connection than the entire Valentine's industrial complex did all week.
Cook the thing you actually like. Not the thing you would cook for a date. The thing you eat when nobody is watching. For me that is buttered noodles with a soft-boiled egg on top, which is not a date dinner, which is not even a recipe, which Frank refuses to eat and which I make for myself approximately once a month. Make it on Valentine's Day. Eat it in front of the television.
Go to a matinee. The 1:15 showing on a weekday afternoon is a sociological wonder. Half the audience is retired, the popcorn is fresh, the seats recline, and nobody is performing romance. I saw Past Lives at a matinee two years ago and cried into my popcorn bag for the last twenty minutes. Worth every dollar.
And if this is the first Valentine's Day you're marking without someone — a spouse, a partner, anyone you used to share the day with — that's a different kind of weather, and I'm not going to pretend a buttered noodle fixes it. Eleanor Hayes has written more honestly about grief after losing a spouse than I can. Read her if you need to. Then come back and call the cousin.
The Group Option, Which Nobody Talks About
My book club has been meeting for 22 years. It started in a living room in Wilmette and now runs on Zoom most weeks, with eight women in eight boxes, wine visible in every shot, somebody's cat walking across a keyboard. We have read approximately 240 books and discussed roughly 12 of them. The rest of the time we talk about our husbands, our adult children, our hips, and the news.
A few years ago one of the girls (Diane, who lives in Naperville, whose husband Hal died in 2019) said she dreaded Valentine's Day because the whole world was performing couples and she felt invisible. So we moved book club to February 14th that year. We didn't call it a Valentine's Day party. We called it Tuesday. We drank good wine, the kind we usually don't open. We did not discuss the book. Diane laughed harder than I'd heard her laugh in a year.
This is the option the holiday marketing skips entirely. Valentine's Day is sold as a couple's holiday, but love comes in shapes the greeting cards don't sell. The friend you've known for 22 years. The neighbor who walks her dog past your house every morning and waves. My friend Gail from the HOA pool, with whom I have an unresolved feud over a plastic tumbler of rosé and whom I would still call if I needed a ride to the airport, is a part of my life, and any holiday claiming to celebrate love that doesn't have room for her is selling something I'm not buying.
Host a dinner. Not a fancy one. Buy a roast chicken from the grocery store, open three bottles of decent red, invite four people whose company you actually enjoy, and tell them it's a Tuesday. Or, if you want a softer entry point, my piece on conversation starters for seniors making new friends has the kind of small-talk scaffolding that turns a roast chicken into an evening.
A Valentine's Day dinner with people who know your stories is worth more than any reservation at a restaurant where the waiter is 22 and the menu is too dark to read.
Here's the Thing
Here's the thing about Valentine's Day at this stage of life.
When you're 25, the holiday is about proving the relationship. When you're 35, it's about scheduling the relationship. By 50, you're remembering it. When you're 72, it's about — well, I'm still figuring it out, but I think it's about permission.
Permission to say out loud the thing you usually leave unsaid. Permission to not perform. Permission to skip dinner reservations and eat at home because the pasta is better at home. Permission to be alone and not call it lonely. Permission to call your book club a Valentine's Day party even though nobody is anybody's valentine. Permission to buy yourself a watercolor saguaro if your husband forgets — and then, when he doesn't forget, to keep his quiet on the matter as the truer love.
The Bombeck part of this column (and I'm telling you this is the Bombeck part so you can brace yourself) is that I didn't expect to believe what I'm about to say. I thought, at 30, that Valentine's Day would either become unnecessary in a long marriage, or it would calcify into a ritual nobody actually enjoyed. I was wrong both times. What it has become, after 47 years with Frank, is one of the few days in the year when I'm allowed to notice him on purpose.
Not all the small things he does without comment. One thing. The carnation, or the saguaro print, or the way he passes me the parmesan grater without being asked because he knows I'm about to ask.
There was a Tuesday once, not Valentine's Day, just a Tuesday, when neither of us said anything across the table and that was exactly right. That, I think, is the same thing.
What I'm Actually Doing on February 14th
Frank will play golf. I will drink coffee on the patio. He will come home with a carnation from the CVS near the Safeway, and the carnation will probably be pink, and I will put it in the small glass vase that we got as a wedding gift in 1978 and have somehow not broken in 47 years. We will make pasta. We will watch The Thin Man. He will snort at the martini scene. I will pretend not to notice.
And at some point in the evening, in a sentence so small you could miss it if you weren't paying attention, one of us will say the thing we usually leave unsaid. We have been doing this for 47 years. The thing is always different. The smallness is the point.
That, and not the $49.99 bear, is what the holiday is actually for.
