To celebrate this season of love, my wife and I have been invited to a Valentine’s gift exchange party. If you grew up in America, perhaps you don’t need the rules of a Valentine’s gift exchange explained. But I didn’t, and apparently, I do. To this event I’m told that each attendee is expected to bring enough tasteful and appropriate tokens of affection to ensure that no-one on the guest list goes home feeling under-loved. My wife, a champion gift-giver and an incurable romantic, seems delighted by the challenge of coming up with perfect gifts for a couple of dozen fellow citizens. I on the other hand, as someone with a bit of a blind spot for the etiquette of appropriate gift-giving, find the whole prospect quite intimidating. That our union has endured all these years is probably proof that the opposing forces of yin and yang are the only things holding the universe together in the first place.
I can’t conjure up any childhood memories of Valentine’s Day at all, besides a vague sense that there was a language in use that I didn’t fully comprehend. Perhaps this was a result of being raised by “no-romance-please-we’re-British” parents. Or perhaps it’s because you Americans started learning to speak that language in grade school, when the members of the Australian all-boys’ school I attended were still out on the playground, hitting each other with cricket bats. My wife tells me that by the time she was in elementary school, Valentine’s Day was already part of the curriculum. In second or third grade, she recalls spending weeks filling hand-made cards with sweet nothings for her friends and classmates, then arriving on the big day bearing an elaborately decorated shoebox, with a mail slot cut in the top for receiving reciprocal expressions of affection. By middle school, when the training wheels started coming off the whole romance thing and her contemporaries moved on from homemade cards to teddy bears and heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, the little girl with frizzy blonde hair and coke bottle glasses, finding her shoebox lighter on professions of love than she might have wished, set about perfecting the art of thoughtful, nuanced, occasionally passive-aggressive gift-giving. For an oblivious young husband recently arrived from overseas and imperfectly schooled in the etiquette of Southern gifting, this meant spending early years hopping through an unfamiliar cultural landscape—foot wedged in mouth—where each unfamiliar national holiday, celebration, or life milestone might bring the expectation of gift-giving. But which holiday? And what gift? And to whom should it be given?! In such a landscape, learning the importance of ignoring statements such as, “You don’t need to get me anything big for Valentine’s Day,” took me longer than it should have done.
Still, given time, patience, and repetition, even the most emotionally stunted student makes progress eventually. So, I hope that my wife will agree that the long journey to spousal enlightenment has been one worth sharing (and not only because the responsibility for coming up with appropriate gifts falls to someone besides me). Among many lessons we have learned during thirty years of married life is that measuring Valentine’s Day or any other celebration by the quality of the gift is missing the point. What seems most special about this upcoming gathering is that, on some level, it hearkens back to an earlier, pre-adult concept of affection—one that preferences good company, shared experience, kindness; and, now we’ve become people-of-a-certain-age, the very real benefits of having been together for a long, long time. Now, I’m off to buy a box of chocolates.
Still trying to get the hang of this, I remain,
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
