Here’s a valentine to all the greeting-card companies I’m letting down this year by not buying someone else’s words.
Maybe something embossed with red, yellow or pink roses (every color is a cliché now), or Ziggy-like creatures holding out daisies to each other amid floating hearts and phrases that the card’s recipient would be mortified even to mouth. At less lucrative times of the year, the same characters lament the recipient’s birthday or attempt humor as he emerges from brain surgery.
Nothing, incidentally, is more treacherous than the get-well or leaving-work card (except maybe a yearbook after your high school crush scribbles “to a great friend,” heart dotting the “i”).
But the Valentine’s Day card comes close.
More misguided lovers buy cards than candy, flowers, gifts or romantic dinners out, according to the Greeting Card Association. Why? Probably because, for guys anyway, it seems cheaper and easier to bypass comparatively expensive plush toys and potted-baby calendars in favor of racks filled with poetry that can’t be worse than ours.
Plus, it’s pretty much a commandment. Give your snookums diamond earrings, and she’ll still want the card – first. The card reassures her that you didn’t just grab the florist’s last bouquet or pick whatever restaurant was next to the Jiffy Lube. An excellent wingman, that folded slab of paper.
Still, you have to write something in it, and not just your initials. Married couples, at least, have mostly established their level of romance. Any disappointment springs from unrealistic expectations – hers. (Let’s face it: Valentine’s Day is for women, who buy 85 percent of cards for the occasion, according to the greeting-card group.) A husband, meanwhile, has just two dreams: that his wife will buy him a seated mower and that she won’t mind if he buys it for her.
But what if the relationship is relatively new, “I love you” remains a rumor, and she hasn’t established how cheap you are yet? Will she want a Magna Carta of your devotion, or recoil if too much is said too soon?
Suddenly, that stupid greeting card, previously a $3-$5 afterthought, becomes a test of your affection rather than a serene expression of it. No, not a test: a midterm, fully one-third to half your grade. (And as any veteran of college blue books knows, penmanship counts. Two friends in my postgraduate youth, independent of each other, said I had the scrawl of a fourth-grader. Which no doubt explains why I’m not married yet and have never been chosen for hall monitor.)
A coffeehouse acquaintance of mine who’s quite lovey-dovey with his girlfriend froze when asked what he was getting her for Valentine’s Day. No clue, he replied, not a one. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s kind of a trap, isn’t it?” I don’t think this helped him.
From my lofty, girlfriendless perch, the answer seems easy: Follow the lead of perhaps the all-time best guy commercial.
A young woman scours the racks of a stationery store, rejecting scores of cards until finding The One. She clutches it to her chest like a keepsake. Meanwhile, her boyfriend is paying for his Budweiser at the liquor store, sees a tacky palm-tree-and-sunset card on a rack and absently buys it.
Later at a kitchen table, she calls his card perfect, and he slumps into a relieved smile – a guy being a guy and somehow getting it right.
He’s almost gotten through Valentine’s Day. And he’s ready for a beer.
Staff writer Vic Vogler can be reached at 303-820-1749 or vvogler@denverpost.com.
