Valentine’s Day is right around the corner and love is definitely in the air. Now I know we all have our reservations about Feb. 14, cupid, flowers, boxes of chocolates and all of that. Some of us refer to it as Singles’ Awareness Day, when people come together to celebrate not being in a couple.
We even have our own ways of defining love based on our experiences. There’s cynicism and melancholy paired with cheerfulness and optimism. Love can come from everywhere or it can come from one source. Love can be easy or it can be hard. Love is a many splendored thing. Love lifts us up where we belong. All you need is love.
We’ve all felt that warm, fuzzy happiness in one way or another. This week, I want to hear about your positive experiences in love.
- What is a unique, fun, outlandish, or creative way in which you have shown someone (your partner, kids, parents, friends, relatives, etc.) that you love them? In what unique or creative way has someone shown that they love you? Keep it clean folks. 😉 I want to know how you’ve untemplated the expression of love.
- In your experience, what has been the most heartfelt and fulfilling expression of love? This could be a time when you have given or shown your love to someone else or it could be when someone expressed their love to you. This could be as big as a purchase of an island or as small as a simple hug and smile.
Feel free to answer one or both of the questions. Where is the love? 😛
It’s funny that you asked us to keep it clean, because the first thing that came to mind was NSFW. Ha.
I like to show love continually through small gestures: flowers, compromise, baking my partner’s favorite cookies or cake, a present, a drawing or painting, a poem. And dirty stuff, which I will apparently have to keep to myself 😉
Funny you should mention – just wrote a Top 10 Ways to WOO post yesterday with some creative ideas to show love 😉 Here are 2 of the clean ones:
1) Set up camp in your living room! Pop up a tent, gather a few sleeping bags and blankets, and enjoy some peace and quiet in the comfort of your own home. Could probably even do s’mores depending on your stove.
2) Replace the Hershey Kiss tag thingies w/ your own words. Cut up some small paper strips, pick up a bag of Hersheys, and swap out the tags w/ your own creative ones!
1 I’ve tried to show my wife that I love her in a number of different ways over the last few years:
– Treasure Hunt – I came up with a series of clues that lead from place to place around the house. The final one pointed towards a gift of some sort. These have been presented (I’ve done two) on no particular day. I set them up so that when she returns from work, she has a pleasant surprise waiting for her.
– Picnic at work – My wife works second shift at Target. For her lunch break, I am sometimes able to meet her so that we can eat together. One time I prepared dinner, put together our picnic set (basket included) and headed to Target. We ate in the closed snack area, complete with cloth napkins and mats, and stemmed glasses with water. Her coworkers were quite jealous and complimented her for at least two days.
2 My wife has a bit of a hard time surprising me. She seems to always give it away. For my birthday (last weekend) she rented a cabin in our favorite national park, planned the meals for the weekend, notified friends and work that I would be unavailable, and packed for us… all without me knowing anything! She put a lot of time, thought, and effort into the weekend; no matter what the outcome had been (weather could have been horrible, etc) that was the part that counted, the thought behind the work.
1. My husband and I took an impromptu eight-hour round-trip to pick up a set of wheels for his car. 😉 I bought them for him for his birthday/Christmas, but the trip itself was kinda fun too. I also try to occasionally surprise him with a box of his favorite candy, just because.
2. There are a couple of things I could say for this one…. The first is when I came home one day to a few beautiful roses. We hadn’t been having the best few days around that time, and I was rather sad & down. Those cheered me right up, even though he was already gone to work.
The other would be how much of a trooper he is with my low self-esteem. I have some pretty bad days with that, but he always tells me how pretty I am, and doesn’t give up even when I try to argue how I’m not.
Other than that, we don’t really celebrate Valentine’s Day. It’s never been my favorite, and I don’t want to fall into the consumerism of it all. (If you don’t buy me something you don’t love me sort of BS.)
The fun (and a little hard 🙂 ) way that I am showing my love to those I care about is that I am writing letters of love and saying I love you publicly on my blog since February 2010 began. It is part of my new Happiness Project!
It has been an exploration to realize all those things that makes me love them and appreciate them. It has filled my heart with even more love in return! It is something that I have never done before and it feels fabulous!
I agree that Valentine’s Day is cliché, commercial and overly mediatised but it just so happens to be the day my husband proposed to me. The nicest thing he did was not proposing per se but LISTENING to me! He took me to a restaurant I had mentioned wanting to try (Le Grand Colbert in Paris from “Something’s Gotta Give”) and he took me there 2 years ago and proposed in front of a crowded restaurant! It meant more to me that he clearly had paid attention to a side comment than the proposition itself 🙂
Ony my end, I try to show people I care for them on ANY day, not just Valentine’s Day. But that’s not very original, now is it? 🙂