David McElroy

We claim Valentine’s Day is about romantic love, but it’s not. The day is really about fantasy — and that fantasy warps our ideas about what love should look like every other day of the year.

Valentine’s Day suggests that love is about over-the-top demonstrations of devotion and adoration, but I wonder if those grand gestures are mostly empty attempts to make up for the way couples live the rest of their lives.

It’s like a guilty way of saying, “I know I’m a terrible husband [or wife], but if I do these showy things for you and your friends to see, I can go back to living the rest of our lives as though you don’t matter.”

I believe love is best demonstrated by the way two people treat each other every single day of the year, not by the showy things they do once a year and attach shiny red plastic hearts. Love that is lived in an authentic way every single day can changes lives; love that’s just expressed when card companies and florists tell you to is shallow and already dying.

I’ve been thinking today about how a man expresses love for his wife. Other people are in better positions to say how a woman can best express her love for her husband (or how it might look in a same-sex relationship). I have no experience with that point of view.

All I know is how a loving man expresses his devotion to the woman who has chosen him:

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It’s a staple of science fiction for a robot to dutifully obey its programming and keep performing the task it was given long after its designers are dead and the task is useless.

One of the most emotionally satisfying tales of this sort is Pixar’s 2008 film “WALL•E.” For 700 years, this little robot has been alone on Earth cleaning up the trash humans left behind when they left the planet. It’s a useless job at this point, but it’s the job he’s been given, so that’s what he does — day after day and year after year.

WALL•E’s human creators are long gone but he doesn’t question what he’s been programmed to do. Over the centuries, though, he develops curiosity and something in him finds the awareness that something isn’t quite right.

WALL•E realizes he’s lonely — something his programmers never prepared him to deal with. When another robot finally shows up on the planet, he falls in love. That love for another robot gives him the incentive to go beyond his programming — to find ways to fill a need he didn’t know he had — but it requires him to give up the task he had been mindlessly doing for all those years in order to pursue Eve instead.

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I was about to leave Chick-fil-A Wednesday evening when I noticed a young woman come in who looked exhausted — as though she had been battling monsters all day.

She was tall and slim, with straight black hair and dark brown skin. She wore black pants and a tailored solid blue shirt that fit her frame tastefully.

Even though she seemed tired, she looked graceful and elegant. She looked lovely. We met one another near the door and spoke politely as we passed.

Then as she stood at the counter waiting for someone to take her order, I quickly went over and spoke.

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