Valentine Schmalentine

Okay I did it!  I made it through the day for lovers without a lover.  A lot of dear friends must have been worried about me. Thank you for the virtual roses (S.P.), the chocolates (F.L.), heart lollipop (K.M.), the heart candies (J.H.) and the twelve long-stemmed yellow roses (??).  I am not sure who to thank for the roses and the marriage proposal (on the accompanying card) but I have a sneaking suspicion there’s a female friend or female relative behind the anonymous delivery to my office today.  For one heart-stopping moment, OneRepublic’s song Come Home started playing in my head and I imagined my husband as the mysterious benefactor, but that quickly passed when I remembered that he doesn’t even know where my office is because he’d never been there even when we were together.  Besides the card said “If it were possible, I’d marry you”, and my husband is... well he is already married to me (as I informed him last fall when he said he was involved with someone else).  So Mom? Sister? Girlfriend?  Thank you for the amazing roses- your generosity  and thoughtfulness are extremely touching.

So on this day of love,  let me tell you what I’ve done for love in the past 10 months. I believed with all my heart that the power of love (I know... nauseating isn’t it?) could conquer the barrier my husband erected on each occasion that I asked if we could meet to talk, or go to a therapist together, or even just go on a date.  I figured I just had to determine what angle to take, what words to use, what part of his history with me to appeal to.  So I made a list and set out to try them all one by one.  I began with an appeal to his integrity.  “But you love me, you said you love me.  You married me.”  Those pleas were met with “I am not going to discuss this with you now” – the old passive aggressive response to emotional displays.  So I tried to appeal to his logic.  “We’ve invested a lot of years in this relationship.  We’ve been through so much. We can’t just write it all off as a bad investment.”  That got me a statement that went something like “How do you think I feel?  I’ve wasted a lot of years too and I’m older than you.”  Crossing those off the list, I attempted to jog his memory about how highly he’d always regarded me. “Remember I spent the night on a chair next to your mother’s bed in the hospital so you could go home and rest!  Remember I advocated for your daughter to get an IEP so her teachers would cut her some slack!  Remember I got your son a scholarship.  I made your mother’s chilli sauce recipe for you every fall.”  But his selective amnesia kicked in and the response was “You are not the woman I thought you were.”  My appeals to fairness “I gave you the last of my fertile years and you didn’t want more children” went nowhere.  I tried suggesting dates, conjugal visits, plays, movies... anything to keep us connected, and the answer was- and I quote- “I can’t be your boyfriend.”  (NO THAT’S RIGHT... YOU CAN’T BE MY BOYFRIEND BECAUSE YOU’RE MY HUSBAND!!!!)  So sheepish as I am to admit it, I did what every red-blooded woman does when faced with rejection. I tried appealing to his baser instincts. I reminded him how much he’d enjoyed our intimate life, and how generous I had been in that domain.  I gave the best rendition of a seduction scene that I knew how, pulled out all the stops and left myself absurdly vulnerable.  He pushed me away, physically pushed me away!  Try to imagine how much that hurt.  Can you sink much lower on the self-esteem scale than offering yourself up in that way and being told to stop?  Oh well, if I can survive that, it will take a herd of rampaging elephants to kill me now.  So here’s what I’ve learned.  If I hadn’t tried everything on my list, I’d still be wondering now as I write this, whether it was okay to give up on this marriage.  If I hadn’t given every last ounce of dignity in an effort to save our marriage, I’d still feel bound by my vows, my integrity, my love for him.  But I’d have to be pretty thick to still be thinking there was any affection left in his heart for me after all this... so now I pray for release and the restoration of lost years.  Feel free to pray for me if you like.

And for those of you with partners on this Valentine’s Day, be kind to each other and be grateful.