There is an old Valentine’s Day story I wanted to relate today. I thought I had already typed it up and shared it. But I wasn’t sure. As I get older, I do not want to be one of the geezers that tells young people the same stories over and over again. The only redeeming value of doing that is to teach the young’uns to be tolerant and patient with the elderly. I scoured my blog searching Valentine, Valentines, and Valentine’s all with and without the Day to see if I had written about it before. I invested an hour doing this including several random distractions in this and have concluded that I have not posted this wee bit of personal Valentine’s Day personal history.
This happened in the early 1980s when I was a graduate student at Wayne State University in Detroit. I was working on a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. Mostly, I took classes on campus in downtown Detroit, but I recall taking one class that was being offered in the suburbs at one of the first satellite campus centers. I do not recall the class nor the location. I do not recall it being one of the less analytic classes in my program. Perhaps it was a class on Product Liability.
As typical of the times, the class was all male and everyone except me had an engineering undergraduate degree. All of us were working and still in shirt, ties, and even the ubiquitous pocket protectors having come to the night class directly from work. Maybe there were fifteen students in the class and, again, if memory serves me correctly, at least ten of them were GM employees. We were all early in our careers in our mid to late 20s. We would chit-chat before class and during the one break in our three-hour class session. After class, everyone was brain dead and just wanted to get home.
It was Valentine’s Day and we had class. During the break, the conversation quickly gravitated to Valentine’s Day and what we bought our wives or girlfriends to celebrate the holiday of love. I believe the vast majority of us were married which was, again, a sign of the times. The gifts were as you might expect. People talked about flowers, candy, and even jewelry. A few bought candy and flowers. Some talked about buying a bouquet of their wife’s favorite flower. It was a pleasant conversation.
One fellow, a tall athletic looking fellow who you would easily believe played basketball in high school, chimed in toward the tail end of the conversation. He said that he and his wife were newlyweds. They were saving to buy a house and said they had agreed NOT to buy each other Valentine’s Day Gifts. Those of us that had a bit more experience were shaking our heads. I blurted out, “Whatever you do, stop anyplace that is open on the way home, buy anything a candy bar, a flower, or whatever and a card.” Everyone else chimed in affirming my advice and warning him that this agreement was folly, and his wife would be some combination of devastated and angry that he did not violate “the agreement.” He insisted several times, “You don’t understand, we agreed to this.” Everyone responded, “No, please trust us, you don’t understand.” We all went back to class knowing he was probably not going to take our advice. After class, some of us took another shot at helping out this fellow but he simply restated his “You don’t understand, we agreed…” rationale.
The next week in class, someone asked him how it went. He said, “It was horrible. You guys were right. She was a crying and did not believe that I didn’t even buy a card. When I brought up ‘But, we agreed not to get gifts this year,’ she cried even harder.” He should have taken our advice… but sometimes there are lessons you can only fully appreciate and learn by experience.
Happy Valentine’s Day to all.
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