“Valentine’s Day is Wednesday,” I told my husband on Sunday evening.

He didn’t respond, which wasn’t surprising.

He has extremely selective hearing.

Just like he can’t hear me scream about a vicious bug being in the house, but I can open a bag of chips behind a closed door and hears it.

“I said, Valentine’s Day is Wednesday.”

He was silent a bit longer.

“Oh, yeah?”

He probably figured it was better to go ahead and face the impending reality.

“Yep.”

“Well, maybe I will get you something special this year.”

He glanced over his shoulder to see if I was buying this malarkey.

“You’re not going to do your usual ‘gift’ of scrubbing the toilet and telling me that says love more than Hallmark ever could, are you?”

The look on his face told me that was indeed his plan.

“That’s not romantic?” he asked.

“No, anything involving Lysol and a scrub brush is not romantic,” I tell him.

Neither is washing my car, brushing the dogs, or any of the other things he has tried to pass off as a Valentine gift when he forgets.

I am not sure which is worse: when he forgets and tries to make up for it, or when he remembers and buys something in a panic.

I think it is really my fault for setting the romance bar so low. I had been quite high maintenance before I met my husband, so I thought it may be time to stop being so demanding.

When we celebrated our first Valentine’s Day and saw the crowd waiting in line outside of the restaurant, I immediately offered the option of just calling in our order or getting pizza.

We ordered take-out from the restaurant and ate half of it at my apartment until his neighbor called to tell him his German shepherd, Venus, had escaped the fence and was in his yard wanting in.

By the time he got back, I had fallen asleep on the couch, so he let Pepper out and covered me with a blanket and went home.

The next year, we were married. 

We picked up pizza after running some errands.

The following year, we were parents.

I don’t even remember what we did.

Since we tend to be creatures of habit, I have a feeling we had pizza.

The next year was when he completely forgot it was Valentine’s Day and gave me a bag of Hershey’s nuggets still in the grocery bag with the receipt.

“They were out of the heart junk,” he announced.

And the next year, I got a box of chocolates on the 15^th, because it was 75 percent off.

The next year, he waited too long – past noon – and he couldn’t even get me a heavily discounted box of candy as a consolation prize.

“You want some Peeps? They’ve got them out already. But they are out of even the bad leftover Valentine candy,” he told me over the phone.

I groaned.

Still, I hold out hope each year, that maybe, maybe he will do something to surprise me.

Maybe there will be a card, or even a small box of candy.

Or maybe, he will do something special.

I have been so desensitized to it that Valentine’s kind of creeped up on me this year, with me not realizing how close it was until I was standing in a store surrounded by balloons, flowers, and big boxes of chocolate.

“I can’t wait to get married and not be single on Valentine’s Day,” I overheard one woman say to her friend.

“Me, too,” the friend replied. “It will be nice to know you will have someone to send you flowers to work and take you somewhere nice.”

I shook my head. 

I wanted to tell them marriage isn’t exactly romance or guarantees your Valentine Days will be full of floral deliveries or non-discounted boxes of chocolate.

Sometimes, it may mean you get a clean bathroom out of it though.