Valentine’s Day…love or hate the holiday, it’s a time to ponder love. Many millions of people celebrate Valentine’s Day across the globe, exchanging material tokens of affection. Imagine if we went beyond the chocolate, beyond the cards, and truly celebrated the verb of love.
What if each of us looked deeply at the ways we love and made a commitment to love better, 365 Days a year.
In all the Global Glue Project couples we have interviewed, not one has credited a gift on Valentine’s Day for keeping them together. The daily acts of kindness on all the other days of the year are what keep love alive.
The gifts of patience, kindness, compassion, vulnerability, and honesty outlast a Valentine.
If your partner loves chocolate, go ahead and indulge on Valentine’s Day, but a daily bite sized piece will show your love more effectively. Couples from Japan, Russia, and across the United States revealed to us that small daily displays of love, such as their partner making their morning cup of coffee helps keep them sticking together.
A small daily act is infinitely more powerful than a large yearly act. A rose a day versus a grand display of 12 dozen roses will have a more lasting impact on your relationship for the long haul. This is true for anything in life; imagine exercising 15 minutes a day versus one full day of exercise yearly.
More important than gifts, love is about presence and attention and attunement to your partner. We all long to be deeply loved, known, acknowledged and seen.
Celebrate Valentine’s Day. But also realize that to love better, we need to remember the importance of the other 364 days of the year.
