Disappointed in my husband's Valentine gift to me

[classylady]

I'm feeling guilty and slightly miffed because I'm not appreciating the Valentine gift my husband gave me. This year, we have absolutely no money for Valentines Day, so we agreed that we would write a letter to one another. I spent a lot of time on my letter to him, trying to express all my love and how much I appreciate him. He wrote two sentences to me, and then copied a long list of quotes about love that he had probably googled and found all in one site. I'm thinking it probably took him all of 1 minute, if that, to write his letter. I'm definitely not feeling the love. I know it's probably just the differences between men and women. But still, I'm thinking he could have put a little effort into it. Where was the romance? Argh! Men! Rant done.

I want to be Christlike, so should I just let it go? Or should I say I was disappointed?

[pam]

I'm so sorry. Part of me says just let it go. The other part is I know if it were me it would fester and continue to grow if I didn't say something. You know your husband best.

[Guest]

Let it go. Easier said than done, for sure, but I wouldn't expect the typical man to pen a paragraphs-long Darcyesque ode to his wife. :)

[annewandering]

He may have put a lot of thought into the quotes he found on google. There really is a lot of useless quotes out there to sift through.

The really nice thing is he did do the letter. I have heard that is not an easy thing for guys to do. It would be really hard for me and I am not even a guy.

[Bini]

I say give him a break. No one knows your husband and his love for you, like you do. If you know that his heart often means well, then chances are that he meant something special for you, even though it may have lacked in execution. Give him a big hug and tell him how much you love him!

[classylady]

Right now, I'm seeing the differences between men and women in a humorous light. I'm actually going to talk to him about it, but I'm not really even miffed at him any more. I thought you might want to see what he sent me. lol Enjoy. I haven't read them all. I'm pretty sure he didn't. He could have stopped with his personal two sentences, and I would have been fine.

"Here are some valentine quotes because I love and appreciate all the things you do. And since I have no poetic talent I’ll Borrow from these because I love thee."

Oh, if it be to choose and call thee mine, love, thou art every day my Valentine! ~Thomas Hood

When love is not madness, it is not love.

~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Many are the starrs I see, but in my eye no starr like thee.

~English saying used on poesy rings

Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction.

~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.

~Albert Einstein

I don't understand why Cupid was chosen to represent Valentine's Day. When I think about romance, the last thing on my mind is a short, chubby toddler coming at me with a weapon.

~Author Unknown

For you see, each day I love you moreToday more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.~Rosemonde Gerard

Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.

~Author Unknown

Love - a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker.

~Author Unknown

I claim there ain'tAnother SaintAs great as Valentine.~Ogden Nash

Trip over love, you can get up. Fall in love and you fall forever.

~Author Unknown

Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart.

~Author Unknown

A hundred hearts would be too fewTo carry all my love for you.~Author Unknown

You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip. ~Jonathan Carroll, "Outside the Dog Museum"

We're all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness - and call it love - true love.

~Robert Fulghum, True Love

Must, bid the Morn awake!Sad Winter now declines,Each bird doth choose a mate;This day's Saint Valentine's.For that good bishop's sakeGet up and let us seeWhat beauty it shall beThat Fortune us assigns.~Michael Drayton

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

~William Shakespeare

kisses are a better fate than wisdom.~e.e. cummings

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

~Author Unknown

Who, being loved, is poor? ~

Oscar Wilde

In melody divine,My heart it beats to rapturous love,I long to call you mine.~Author Unknown

Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.

~Robert Browning

Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents! Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.

~M*A*S*H, Hawkeye

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.

~George Moore

We loved with a love that was more than love.

~Edgar Allan Poe

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat. ~Ben HechtTime is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.

~Henry Van Dyke

Are we not like two volumes of one book?

~Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,A song is no song 'til you sing it,And love in your heartWasn’t put there to stay -Love isn’t love'Til you give it away.~Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, "You Are Sixteen (Reprise)"I've fallen in love many times... always with you.

~Author Unknown

Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia. ~Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975What I need to live has been given to me by the earth. Why I need to live has been given to me by you.

~Author Unknown

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.

~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.

~Natalie Clifford Barney

Take away love and our earth is a tomb.

~Robert Browning

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

~Zora Neale Hurston

Love is a game that two can play and both win.

~Eva Gabor

Without love, the rich and poor live in the same house.

~Author Unknown

Valentine hearts beat more passionately than everyday hearts.

~Anonymous, winner of February 2011 quotegarden Twitter create your own quote contest

Without Valentine's Day, February would be... well, January.

~Jim Gaffigan

We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack.

~Marie Ebner Von Eschenbach, Aphorism

I love thee - I love thee,'Tis all that I can sayIt is my vision in the night,My dreaming in the day.~Thomas Hood

Love, and a cough, cannot be hid.

~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651

Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before.

~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Poetry spills from the cracks of a broken heart, but flows from one which is loved. ~Christopher Paul Rubero

A man is not where he lives, but where he loves.

~Latin Proverb

Tell me how many beads there areIn a silver chainOf evening rain,Unravelled from the tumbling main,And threading the eye of a yellow star: -So many times do I love again.~Thomas Lovell Beddoes

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.

~Plato

True love stories never have endings.

~Richard Bach

Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold.

~Zelda Fitzgerald

Love is missing someone whenever you're apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because you're close in heart.

~Kay Knudsen

Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs.

~Ovid

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

I need the starshine of your heavenly eyes,After the day's great sun.~Charles Hanson Towne

Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name.

~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Love would never be a promise of a rose garden unless it is showered with light of faith, water of sincerity and air of passion.

~Author Unknown

Sometimes we make love with our eyes. Sometimes we make love with our hands. Sometimes we make love with our bodies. Always we make love with our hearts. ~Author Unknown

The eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

~Margaret Atwood

You know when you have found your prince because you not only have a smile on your face but in your heart as well.

~Author Unknown

Love puts the fun in together, the sad in apart, and the joy in a heart.

~Author Unknown

Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.

~Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

A baby is born with a need to be loved - and never outgrows it.

~Frank A. Clark

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.

~Rose Franken

Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.

~Swedish Proverb

I love you like crazy, baby'Cuz I'd go crazy without you.~Pixie Foudre

How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.

~Victor Hugo

It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves.

~John Bulwer

Love is not singular except in syllable.

~Marvin Taylor

They who meet on an April night are forever lost in love, if there's moonlight all about and there's no moon above.

~E.Y. "Yip" Harburg and Fred Saidy, dialogue just before the song "Old Devil Moon" in the musical Finian's Rainbow

Love me and the world is mine.

~David Reed

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

~Robert Frost

Love is the poetry of the senses.

~Honoré de Balzac

Come live in my heart and pay no rent.

~Samuel Lover

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.

~Erich Segal

Love is what you've been through with somebody.

~James Thurber, quoted in Life magazine, 1960Love is being stupid together.

~Paul Valery

For twas not into my ear you whisperedBut into my heartTwas not my lips you kissedBut my soul~Judy Garland

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words. ~William Shakespeare

My heart to you is given:Oh, do give yours to me;We'll lock them up together,And throw away the key.~Frederick Saunders

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.

~Pablo Picasso

What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.

~Pearl Bailey

Give me a kisse, and to that kisse a score;Then to that twenty, adde a hundred more;A thousand to that hundred; so kisse on,To make that thousand up a million;Treble that million, and when that is done,Let's kisse afresh, as when we first begun.~Robert Herrick, "To Anthea (III)"

Falling in love is so hard on the knees.

~Aerosmith

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

~Voltaire

The most beautiful view is the one I share with you.

~Author Unknown

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. ~Stephen King

My whole heart for my whole life.

~French saying used on poesy rings

Like I've always said, love wouldn't be blind if the braille weren't so damned much fun. ~Armistead Maupin, Maybe the Moon

Love is metaphysical gravity.

~R. Buckminster Fuller

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden.

~Attributed to Claudia Ghandi

[Dove]

Hello, Classy Lady;

I believe I can understand your disappointment. I think maybe you feel that your husbands' heart was not in this; hence, the little effort you perceive he made. Maybe you feel it's a reflection of how he values you.....

Whatever you are feeling, I would suggest instead of the temptation to take it out on your husband (probably not Christ-like and something you wouldn't do) to instead love yourself and, through the Spirit, work out what's bothering you about this.

It's hard. I've had to learn to release all expectations of others. I've realised placing these expectations of others is quite unfair to them. I mean this as far as interpersonal relationships go....

So sorry this Valentine's Day was disappointing....I relate to that and having some hard days with my husband, who I love, and who loves me, dearly..

Dove

[Guest LiterateParakeet]

Hey ClassyLady,

I think it is fine to feel and express disappointment. I don't think there is anything wrong with feelings, it is the way we act on them that sometimes gets us into trouble. Even before I read your second post, I trusted that you were just venting and would 'get over it quickly' and you did.

I think that it is unfortunate that in our culture (and I am thinking of the larger American culture not just LDS) we have largely lost the ability to simply listen and validate someone's feelings. We are a quick fix society. That's a shame. I think we would all be healtheir with a bit more listening and validations. So (((hugs))) for your disappointment. Feel it, own it, it's ok.

I think your husband simply didn't feel comfortable with this written form of communication. (that doesn't mean you can't feel disappointed.) I don't blame him, I call myself a writer (to be sure writing is a large part of who I am) but even I quail at sitting down and expressing my love for my husband in writing. Yikes! I just can't seem to do it.

[Finrock]

I was gonna say something, but, on second thought, what do I know?

Regards,

Finrock

[Soulsearcher]

I can understand the disappointment, but i do offer another thought.

Even as a man who has no problem writing letters like that and actually prefers them to any type of verbal expression, you have no idea how often i turn to quotes to highlight or add to my expressions. Sometimes in my mind my words can't do my feelings for someone justice and i think they deserve only the most eloquent and heartfelt expression of what i feel. I will sometimes take hours to find just the right quote(yes i know it's sad) to resonate inside me and say "YES THAT'S IT!!" Now looking at the quotes maybe your hubby did get them all on one site and maybe did little work himself. Or maybe he selected each of the quotes himself, or at least weeded through. They may not be his words, but reading a lot of the quotes i'd laugh and be touched if many of them were directed towards me by the person i love. I guess for me "it's the thought that counts" holds a lot of sway vs what expectations i hold others to, because at first glance we don't know what they were thinking as the did things.

[Windseeker]

Judging from the number of quotes it would seem that he Loves you allot!

[classylady]

I didn't have to bring it up. He asked me if I had read his Valentines letter to me. And, I just laughed, and said "Yes. I'm not laughing at you, hon, but I'm laughing about the differences between men and women and what they think is romantic". I told him I was a little disappointed in the letter, but it was okay. He says, he had ran out of time, so he was just going to google a love poem, and he saw all these quotes, and copied that instead. I asked him if he had read them all, and he said no, and laughed along with me. Nothing was said in anger. He knows I was a little disappointed. All is well.

I do know that he can write heart-felt sentiment because he has done so in the past. But, after 32 years of Valentines, it doesn't matter. I know he loves me.

[rameumptom]

You are looking at the gift horse in the mouth. It is one day in an entire year. How does your husband show love and support the rest of the year? That is the important issue here, not whether he wrote something that you approve of.

The spirit of contention seeks to fester and destroy families. I suggest you move on, and appreciate the fact that he did take a minute to write you something.

[Smeagums]

classylady -

I think your husband has more of a reason now to be upset at you for sharing a personal letter he created for you.

JMHO

[NightSG]

I want to be Christlike, so should I just let it go? Or should I say I was disappointed?

Well, I think part of the problem here is that we lack a direct example; we can discuss whether Christ was married until the cows come home, but I think we can all agree that He didn't have a husband, and that He didn't celebrate Valentine's Day at all.

Your husband did something. Either be satisfied with that, or sit down with him and tell hime exactly how you feel.

[Sharky]

Okay, as a guy that is expected to provide sentimental words to my wife .....

So often those words come out sounding kind of "cheesey" as I fumble around trying to express those types of things using my own words.

This is especially the case when "ordered" or "forced" to say them, such as an "agreed upon Valentines letter".

It has taken my wife 20+ years to come to realize this, if she looks, the words she is wanting to hear are spoken in volumes through actions.

And if she listens, those words are spoken softly, though not always when she wants to hear them.

That's not to say that the words a never spoken or said or not needed .... they are needed, she does need to hear them spoken & to be able to read them & she does, but it can not be staged or "ordered" or forced or on a time-table set by the other party.....

Those words, at least for this husband, have to come in a natural form & usually the timing is rather unexpected by both of us.

[EarlJibbs]

So I had a big long post written out, then I deleted it when I realised I could just write a short one summarizing the outcome.

Talk to him about it. Understand where he is coming from. Hopefully he understands where you are coming from and you both can compromise.

[Bini]

I like what most everyone has shared. I would also have to agree that posting your husband's personal letter to you online might not have been the most graceful decision. But I'm glad to hear that you're not as bummed out anymore.

[mnn727]

He's a guy - cut him some slack!

I am an amateur writer and I wouldn't have a clue how to write 'the mushy stuff' women like.

Edited February 15, 2013 by mnn727

[Backroads]

Unless it's really bothering you, I say let it go. I consider it to be a sweet gesture.

[classylady]

Don't worry. There are no hard feelings. DH knows I posted his letter here. He's okay with it. In fact he wants to hear all the responses. What he told me this morning, was that he wasn't thinking of the letter as a love letter, but rather as a valentine. He was sending me a valentine. I had expected a love letter, because that was what I had sent him, and he had read it prior to writing his letter, so I was expecting something along the same lines that I had written.

Our relationship is such, that we share pretty much everything with each other. This was never a big deal with me. True, I was a little disappointed at first, but I got over it pretty quickly, and then I could see the humor in it. This was all just a difference in expectation.

Edited February 16, 2013 by classylady

[Irishcolleen]

I'm glad you see the humor in it now and that you got over it. Marriage is so precious, we need to be patient with our spouses. I think most disagreements happen when we haven't communicate our expectations clearly. I'm still learning after 20 years that my dear husband is not a mind reader! Years of love are so much more important than a card/letter.

[YaYaYaYana]

~Maybe he just felt that he doesn't know how to express himself well through writing, and felt his love would be better represented by examples he found from poems....

~ I know it feels horrible if you feel that you have been cheated out of something.. but you never know, maybe this is his best... You shouldn't compare his letter to your letter .... Not everyone knows how to pour their soul out on paper ....

~ I'm not even a man .. In fact I'm a 24 year old girl... and I don't think I would even be able to attempt a love letter ... Like most people I'm just not good at that kind of stuff... I would opt out of writing the letter and insist on buying a card and gift even if I was broke....

Problems come when you start to compare something... Like comparing your awesomely written letter that you've been able to come up with all on your own,.... to his that is not so original from your point of view ....

It's the same thing with me and a friend from years ago... before I was good at art we agreed to draw birthday cards for each other... She made me an original beautiful one cause she took art classes.. I felt that it would be better if I traced off some characters from her favorite book and colored them in ...............................Of course the end result, was she confronted me for taking the easy way out .. felt that I didn't put any though or effort into my card .... Of course I was crushed cause I spent hours trying to find the best positioned characters to trace and what colors best to use ......

You should just put this behind you and give your husband credit at least he TRIED... and you don't even know to what extent ... what if this is his best .... Now imagine what would happen if u confront him!!!

[carlimac]

I have friends who's husbands don't do anything for Valentine's Day. They refuse to buy into the Hallmark holiday. I had one year where my husband blew it off. I was devastated and hurt. Since then I've learned over the years to just keep my expectations low so that I don't get hurt again. Sometimes he's sweet and romantic. Sometimes he's clutzy or hurried or forgetful. I agree with whoever said that we need to focus on the sum total of what goes on day to day over the years rather than a few days out of the year.

Now here's my beef. I can't count how many women posted on facebook what their husbands gave them or did for them...Dinners out, dates to concerts and movies, flowers, one even got some red high heel shoes. I just think it's stupid to post that stuff on facebook. Do their husbands really need to be thanked in public that way? Or are they bragging? Do these women not realize that there are innumerable friends who are either single and lonely or who have Neanderthal husbands who don't do anything for them who will be hurt or at the very least be made to feel sad or wistful by reading their posts. In my opinion, it's best to just keep Valentines Day to yourselves... (unless of course you come to lds.net to ask how to handle a prickly situation. That's different.)

Edited February 17, 2013 by carlimac

[Bini]

I post on Facebook the MANY nice things my husband does for me and had gotten me. I don't do it to rub it into others faces, and it's too bad if some feel that way.