Valentine Card Woes

[oggbashan]

Forty-five years ago I gave my then potential girlfriend a Valentine Card. I had bought it a quarter of an hour earlier in a newsagent’s shop. It was fairly basic, a picture of a pink elephant holding a red heart, and blank inside. I had written a few words for her.

Forty five years later? We have been married for nearly forty-four years.

But – I couldn’t buy a Valentine Card like that now. Each of the last forty-four years I have given my wife a Valentine Card, and every year it has got harder for me to find a suitable one.

Why?

Valentine Cards, like Birthday and many Christmas Cards, are now specific. You can’t buy a simple card and write your own message. You have a selection for Wife, Husband, Fiancé, Fiancée, Girlfriend etc and there aren’t many of each category in the display. Most of the limited selection for “Wife” express sentiments I wouldn’t use. I love my wife but she doesn’t appreciate gushing verse, or platitudes, nor large expensive padded cards in massive boxes.

Some of the categories worry me. Why would you want to send a Valentine Card to:

Son, Daughter, Nephew, Niece, Grandson, Granddaughter, Great-Nephew, Uncle, Aunt, Granny etc.?

I think Valentine’s Day is for lovers, for partners or potential partners, not for miscellaneous relations. You might love your granddaughter, but sending her a Valentine Card? That seems sick.

For every one of the last forty-three years I have eventually found a Valentine Card that was reasonably appropriate but it took time and effort to eliminate all the unsuitable ones.

This year? I was defeated in my search. I couldn’t find a single Valentine Card I would want to give to my wife. My solution?

I bought a birthday card ‘For my Wife’ that was pink, in a pink envelope. Inside I crossed out the word ‘Birthday’ from the message 'Have a Happy Birthday’ and replaced that word by ‘Valentine’s Day’. I left the next line ‘With all my love’.

It was an acceptable substitute. My wife has given up sending me Valentine Cards. She admitted defeat in a card shop twenty years ago.

Have you found it difficult or impossible to find a suitable card that expresses what you really want to say?

 

[Penuche]

Forty-five years ago I gave my then potential girlfriend a Valentine Card. I had bought it a quarter of an hour earlier in a newsagent’s shop. It was fairly basic, a picture of a pink elephant holding a red heart, and blank inside. I had written a few words for her.

Forty five years later? We have been married for nearly forty-four years.

But – I couldn’t buy a Valentine Card like that now. Each of the last forty-four years I have given my wife a Valentine Card, and every year it has got harder for me to find a suitable one. <snip>


Have you found it difficult or impossible to find a suitable card that expresses what you really want to say?

Yes - for the reasons you've listed. Even the one I settled for had to be toned down a bit.

 

[_Lynn_]

Have you found it difficult or impossible to find a suitable card that expresses what you really want to say?

I rarely buy cards. I prefer to write something that's personal for the occasion.

 

[lovecraft68]

I know what you mean and there is a solution....

There are series of cards out there that are basically titled "Love" and several card manufacturers have them. They are generally fairly plain, but have poems or verse on them about loving relationships and there's a variety.

I buy those for any occasion and simply add Happy...whatever when I sign it.

Love is 365 days a year and a certain occasion does not have to warrant a specific way to say it.

Congrats on 44 years, that's amazing.

 

[oggbashan]

Added: That Valentine Card forty-five years ago produced our first date.

Buying a Valentine Card for my wife is a tradition to celebrate our relationship, and because it WAS a Valentine Card, that's why it is important to us.

We can, and do, express our love for each other throughout the year, but this day and that card are special (Yes - she still has the original one!). Not getting a Valentine Day card was a failure. Of course I could make my own, or buy a generic 'love' card, but the real point was to get a suitable Valentine Day card 45 years later.

Maybe I'll have better luck next year.

 

[beachbum1958]

My wife eschews 'lovey-dovey' sentiment and Hallmark moments; as far as she's concerned, the real stuff's in the fridge or in her jewelry box. She knows Valentine cards make me squirm with embarrassment, blaring out sentiments in public for anyone to read that I'd hesitate to utter in private and keep a straight face, so doesn't buy me one, because I wouldn't know what to do with it. I love my wife truly, madly, deeply, and she doesn't need a card to tell her that, I can do that quite well all on my ownsome. We don't go out and have special 'snuggly' romantic meals in dimly-lit restaurants, or short-breaks away to a secluded country hotel just because it's Valentine's Day; we do that as a matter of course, when the mood takes us, we don't need to save it all up to show it on one day of the year.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I've done something similar, with repurposing a card for a different occasion. Sometimes I manage to find one that's just right, but it's getting harder and harder.

I don't know what the deal is with the increasingly specialised cards. It looks like an inventory-control nightmare; the more little categories you have, the easier it is to run out of some and be stuck with others that nobody's buying.

 

[Weird Harold]

Some of the categories worry me. Why would you want to send a Valentine Card to:

Son, Daughter, Nephew, Niece, Grandson, Granddaughter, Great-Nephew, Uncle, Aunt, Granny etc.?

It is not that you would want to send those cards, it is that Hallmark(tm), et al, want you to buy those cards.

The solution to your search is to self-publish the perfect card each year. An e-Card is another possibility but it would have to be a very special, unique, personalized card and not one of the generic prefab cards from an e-Card site.

 

[GoldenCojones]

Valentine Cards, like Birthday and many Christmas Cards, are now specific. You can’t buy a simple card and write your own message. You have a selection for Wife, Husband, Fiancé, Fiancée, Girlfriend etc and there aren’t many of each category in the display. Most of the limited selection for “Wife” express sentiments I wouldn’t use. I love my wife but she doesn’t appreciate gushing verse, or platitudes, nor large expensive padded cards in massive boxes.

Some of the categories worry me. Why would you want to send a Valentine Card to:

Son, Daughter, Nephew, Niece, Grandson, Granddaughter, Great-Nephew, Uncle, Aunt, Granny etc.?

I think Valentine’s Day is for lovers, for partners or potential partners, not for miscellaneous relations. You might love your granddaughter, but sending her a Valentine Card? That seems sick.

In Texas we give Valentines cards to just about everyone. My sister-in-law gives one to her damned dog. I'm pretty sure she doesn't see her dog as a potential mate. Well, at least I hope not. At least I hope I never have to hear about it

There are a couple of stores here that still sell the blank ones. I buy those. The pictures on the front are pretty generic, but I get to write what I want in them.

 

[oggbashan]

It is not that you would want to send those cards, it is that Hallmark(tm), et al, want you to buy those cards.

...

In Texas we give Valentines cards to just about everyone. My sister-in-law gives one to her damned dog. I'm pretty sure she doesn't see her dog as a potential mate. Well, at least I hope not. At least I hope I never have to hear about it

...

In the UK, at least for my generation, Valentines Cards are for some one special person that we love (or hope to love) and want to be our girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband or partner.

But it seems that isn't enough for the card manufacturers and retailers. I'm getting increasingly annoyed about all the 'occasions' for which they expect me to send a card.

Christmas Cards? Yes.
Birthday Cards? Yes.
Congratulations on your new baby? Yes.
Congratulations on your Engagement? Maybe.

Mother's, Father's, Grandmother's, Grandfather's, Divorce, Passed Driving Test, Easter, Eid, Hannukah, Chinese New Year, Diwali, Pancake Day, Halloween, and anything else?
Fuck off!

 

[49greg]

I find the same difficulty, not just valentine cards, but birthday cards as well. I have to spend too much time trying to find the right card. Yes, they're too specific.

As for who to get a card. Well I spent first and second grade in an American school. I can remember in 2nd grade having to give a card to everyone else in class. Even Kathy R. who I hated. We even were given a big 8 x 10 envelope taped to the side of our desks for cards to go in.

Later from 3rd grade on I was in a British School, where it was called Primary 3, and we didn't make cards nor was there an organized thing in class for valentine or christmas card giving.

At one point in my life, back in the USA, I was in a factory, when I made the jump from factory floor to the front office, everyone had a mail slot near the front entrance. I was amazed at how many people put Christmas cards in EVERY slot. Later in a smaller office it was pretty much expected that everyone give everyone else a card. I thought I was back in the second grade.

After a few years I Just Said No! People close to me get a card - in the mail.

 

[NaokoSmith]

This year I haven't got the Fella cluttering up the place any more so I didn't have to do cards or chocolates or cook a special meal or watch The Sopranos in an effort to be romantic even though I find Sopranos interesting but not romantic. I got to go out to watch the rugby on my own in a bar surrounded by three attentive young waiters and a glass of fine red wine, followed by one of Prosecco .

I came to hate Valentines Day as in my youth everybody got so agitated about it, and whether they had a lot of cards = admirers = success de femme, while not really caring about the people they got the cards from. We are not all so lucky as Ogg's wife. Why, he even brought back Le Creuset ... no let me amend that: he even brought back the right kind of Le Creuset from a sale off a trip to France for her!

I did used to make the Fella a card every year with a lipstick kiss on it. It was a joke because the first year I met him, I put such a card in his pigeon-hole, fondly imagining that he would match up the lipstick and recognise who it was from You can just tell I had been sleeping with women for several years, can't you. He of course completely failed this basic test and eventually I had to throw myself at him in a very obvious manner on the train to pin him down.

This year I gave Piglet a little heart-shaped mirror and a card, because I didn't want her to feel left out if people around her get cards from spotty lads they didn't really want a card from and she didn't. Luckily our local art-y shop has lots and lots of very pretty non-specific Valentine's cards. I chose one with a small ornamental glass decoration depicting a rose and heart, and I wrote in the blank interior: "You will always be my baby," - a silly joke between us.

 

[OzoneRed]

It occurs to me that I've never seen a card for Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, etc. I wonder if there's an entrepreneurial opportunity here.

 

[NaokoSmith]

It occurs to me that I've never seen a card for Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, etc. I wonder if there's an entrepreneurial opportunity here.

 

[Penuche]

It occurs to me that I've never seen a card for Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, etc. I wonder if there's an entrepreneurial opportunity here.

Plenty on sale from stalls at various Pagan events and from the usual suppliers, just not mainstream.

I remember when if you wanted to give Yule cards to your Pagan friends you had to make your own or spend a ridiculous amount of money. I spent hours drawing a couple of dozen foliate heads...

 

[Ewobbit]

In the UK, at least for my generation, Valentines Cards are for some one special person that we love (or hope to love) and want to be our girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband or partner.

But it seems that isn't enough for the card manufacturers and retailers. I'm getting increasingly annoyed about all the 'occasions' for which they expect me to send a card.

Christmas Cards? Yes.
Birthday Cards? Yes.
Congratulations on your new baby? Yes.
Congratulations on your Engagement? Maybe.

Mother's, Father's, Grandmother's, Grandfather's, Divorce, Passed Driving Test, Easter, Eid, Hannukah, Chinese New Year, Diwali, Pancake Day, Halloween, and anything else?
Fuck off!

Damn, Ogg. You've been holding that in waaaayyyy too long.

In all seriousness though, I'm with you on that one. Many blue moons ago when I was still in Elementary school, the teachers made us make little shoe box "mail boxes" for each of the holidays. I was all of six, mind you.

And when I opened that box and saw the same dinky little cards that everybody got from everybody else (except me) in the classroom, including the dickheads that were bullying me on the playground, I decided it was just as much bullshit as the "also ran" 8th place ribbons at the Elementary track meets. (There were only eight lanes on the damn track!)

Edit; as far as your OP, I bought a "card" that was 3 feet wide by a foot and a half tall for the MRS. several years ago. We framed it (a puppy carrying a bunch of roses) and I hadn't even tried since.

 

[Bramblethorn]

We are not all so lucky as Ogg's wife. Why, he even brought back Le Creuset ... no let me amend that: he even brought back the right kind of Le Creuset from a sale off a trip to France for her!

Ooh. That's a keeper! I think the most successful present I ever gave my partner was a set of good kitchen knives. (I had to show ID to prove I was over 16.)

 

[beachbum1958]

It occurs to me that I've never seen a card for Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, etc. I wonder if there's an entrepreneurial opportunity here.

My wife buys hers from:

http://www.pagandreams.co.uk/

 

[Ewobbit]

It's official Ogg. They've gone too far. They now have "Dear John" pastries.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddri...lling-breakup-cake/ar-BBpxoin?ocid=spartandhp