I never loved Valentine's Day. Thank God I married a British woman

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/11/valentines-day-married-couple

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My earliest memories of Valentine’s Day are blurry but traumatic. I seem to recall my mother buying large packs of generic Valentine’s cards for us to fill out and take to school, and although I had no interest in this, she would insist that I at least do one for my teacher. I couldn’t think of anything worse, whether I disliked the teacher or was in love with her – it would be a mortifying ordeal either way.

But my mother was a teacher and a stickler for basic classroom protocol. So I compromised: if I could find a way to slip the card on to the teacher’s desk without being seen just as the last bell rang, I would obey; otherwise I would throw it into the school pond on the way home and lie about it.

I was 15 when my first girlfriend more or less instructed me to buy her some jewelry for Valentine’s Day. We picked it out together – a fat little gold-plated heart on a chain – on a school trip to New York, and I handed over all my money, about $50. The idea was that I would hang on to it for a few weeks and then offer it to her on the day as a symbol of my unshakeable devotion. In the intervening period between the trip and February 14th, I made the mistake of showing it to my mother.

“Just make sure it doesn’t become a ring through your nose,” she said. This would have been a more apt analogy if the necklace had, in fact, been a ring, but I remember it chiefly because it was our first and last little chat regarding affairs of the heart. My girlfriend wore my Valentine’s present every day until she broke up with me to go out with my friend Adam.

You can accuse me of being unromantic and a spoilsport, but I have always thought there was something not quite right about Valentine’s Day. It’s got nothing to do with the crass commercialization. I don’t mind that; if anything, I prefer an occasion you can shop your way out of. I think the commercialization of Christmas is probably my favorite part.

Valentine’s Day just seems to commemorate that aspect of love that is coercive and a bit creepy; it reminds me of holding hands in the hall until your palms sweat and your little finger goes numb. Or of queueing at a flower stall behind every other idiot in the world. I’m sure it doesn’t have to be that way.

Later on, Valentine’s Day served to provide subsequent girlfriends with a dangerous opportunity for reassessment. I keep thinking of candlelit suppers, parties and ski weekends that were, in hindsight, the moment everything started to unravel, the point when she first decided she could do better. In my memory I have probably dragged a few tragic evenings from elsewhere in the calendar into February, draped them in red and hosed them in cheap champagne, but when I look back on Valentine’s Days past I don’t recall even one good one. I have been lonely many times in my life, but I never once regretted being single on Valentine’s.

I knew that if I was ever going to get married, I would have to find a woman who felt the same way about this stupid holiday as I did. And eventually I found her – in England. She is more suspicious of the whole business than I am. There might be something a touch anti-American in her dislike of this deeply commodified version of romance, but I can live with that.

Anyway, as a married person I feel as if I have somehow graduated from Valentine’s Day, which is effectively a sort of amateur night. We now have our own anniversary to commemorate or forget.

I know what my wife would say if I asked her what she wanted to do on Valentine’s Day, because last week I asked her. She wrinkled her nose in distaste, and then put a hand on her hip and shook her head gently, as if genuinely dumbfounded.

“I don’t know,” she said. “A movie?” I can see her thinking: we’ll need somewhere to hide until Valentine’s Day is over, but also something to do in case people ask how we spent it afterward.

“A movie,” I said. “Perfect.”

These days, thanks to my wife, I no longer dread Valentine’s Day. And I have always had a soft spot for those little candy hearts. This time of year, I would walk a long way for a bag of candy hearts.

Tim Dowling’s book, How to Be a Husband, is out this week