Valentine Despair - or Relationship problems

For those people not in happy coupledom, does the sight of all those red hearts make you despair? What tips and advice can you share?
I'm currently eyeing up the heart shaped biscuit cutters on sale, hoping that in just over a week, I may be able to snaffle some at half price. I lost all my cutters last year and so far have replaced a few Christmas themed cutters in January.
I'm currently eyeing up the heart shaped biscuit cutters on sale, hoping that in just over a week, I may be able to snaffle some at half price. I lost all my cutters last year and so far have replaced a few Christmas themed cutters in January.
Comments
Here's one for you, Rossweisse.
The El Paso Zoo is running a "Quit Bugging Me" campaign for Valentine's day, wherein you may contact them by Facebook and have them name a cocroach after your ex. On Valentine's Day, the cockroach will be fed to one of their meerkats as a snack on FB Live.
https://www.facebook.com/elpasozoo/photos/a.482518977621/10156975620942622/?type=3&theater
Thank God for the internet. I never would have known this was possible.
AFF
I do despair at the M&S Love Sausage though. What were they thinking?
That's not what I'd think of first when love sausage is mentioned!
AG
(mind like a sewer)
Mine is in the same place. The fact that they come in oppositely bending pairs doesn't help any.
You all must be saints compared to me.
AG
**Shiver**
And I know it is overrated, overpriced, overcommercialised. But there's a bit of me that wishes he would surprise me with a dozen red roses and a card with red hearts on it and soppy words inside. Because I'm worth it.
This
But not this.
I’d rather be given roses (yellow) as a surprise on a random day.
A bit like Mother’s Day - Valentine’s Day seems false and forced to me. We’ve never bothered with it.
I'll get me coat... because actually that's decent point.
AG
I'd like both-and.
The truth is, we're fuddy duddies. And we like being fuddy duddies. Suck it up.
A few years before that, I had volunteered to help at a charity event that was held on February 14 (why they chose that date I don't know). I showed up, and after I waited around for a while, getting increasingly annoyed, it turned out they didn't need me. There I was all gussied up and nowhere to go. Any other night of the year I would have stopped at a nice restaurant and treated myself to dinner on the way home.
So this year -- it's me and my dental appointment. That's it!
😳😵
I won’t be going out tonight as my other half is away. Nor will my son as he and his wife have just returned from a romantic holiday sans kids.
We don’t do Valentines anyway.
Sadly, in twenty-four years of supposedly romantic exclusive attachment one to another, the spirit has so moved him on, I think, six occasions. Okay, so it's not a competition, but I have bought that man more bottles of single malt scotch than he's bought me...anything...I might like to have*...
I suspect that a further problem lies with the fact that I am regarded as being a sensible woman, and as such am held to have the same perspective as himself on the utility of such things as bunches of flowers** - I mean, they just die anyway, so what's the point?
What, indeed, is the point? There sure isn't any point in trying to get him to change...
Anoesis, who is middle-aged and sad.
----
*He did buy me a lego set, once, to my initial bafflement. But then, he enjoys lego.
**My clear attachment to flowers can be noted anytime you look out the windows of my house - but then, perhaps I don't need any more, because I'm already growing them?...
I enjoyed the walk to W++tr+se.
When my daughter was little, I often felt obligated to purchase gifts for her to give my ex/ her father on his birthday, Father's Day, Christmas. I was always drawn to Heifer Project, where you can give livestock to a family in the developing world as an alternate gift for someone. The ones I considered were: a turkey, a boar, or half a donkey...
This simple expedient -- of not expecting one's husband to read one's mind, but saying openly what one wants -- could be so beneficial to so many marriages.
That's a whole nother question, of course. This hearkens back to the whole thing about women thinking they can change men and men thinking women will never change, and both being disappointed. But if your man won't take a hint, AND won't listen when you actually come out and say it, perhaps your marriage is on rocky ground. (Generic "you".)
Believe me, I have learned that it is not sufficient to ask "Could you please bring the washing in?" - it is necessary to say "Could you please bring the washing in, sort it, fold it up, and put the piles into the relevant bedrooms?" - as the first request leads to a pile of clean washing being dumped upon the nearest horizontal surface inside the door.
In this instance, though, what one wants is not so much to have one's mind read, as to be noticed from time to time, independently of his needing something from me, and without having to jump up and down waving one's arms and shrieking - without having to already be in meltdown territory.
You need to wear ribbons down your back.
Or with the noticing? Hm. Well, he asked me out, and asked me to be his girlfriend, and asked me to marry him. And then, yeah.
(I do see what you're getting at, here, btw - if he's always been like that it's unreasonable for me to expect anything else, because men can't change). However, if two people are going to make a shared life, istm neither of them can expect not be changed by the experience - but as long as people are peddling this sort of John Gray horseshit, half the population has a ready-made excuse for ensuring that the majority of the accommodating will continue to be done by the other half.