David McElroy

I noticed the cupcakes in the woman’s arms as we waited for the elevator on the fourth floor. It was a tray of a dozen or so cupcakes you get at any grocery store’s bakery section. It was lunch and I was hungry, so they looked good.

“If I ever turn to a life of crime, I’m going to start robbing people with cupcakes like those,” I joked with her.

A elevator dinged to announced its arrival and we stepped on. As we rode to the first floor, we joked about the difficulty of staying away from sugar.

As we stepped out of the elevator in the lobby, another woman joined her. As we were walking out of the building, the first woman pointed to the second and made a mocking accusation.

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Every day, the world wants to sell us just a little bit more.

The sales pitch is seductive. You can have this car, this house, this vacation, these clothes, these electronics, these toys. You can have a life of luxury and pride.

People can look up to you. They can envy you. They can admire you. Maybe, the sales pitch whispers, they might even love you. They might give you approval.

And the price? It’s trivial. Just a little bit more of your time.

The world can be yours if you’ll just hand over more of the only thing you really have — your hours, your days, your weeks, your years.

Your family won’t mind if you’re gone most of the time. Your wife won’t care if you work nights. Your husband won’t care if you have an additional job. After all, it’s extra money for the family — to buy all those things that are so important.

And your children? They won’t mind a few extra hours in “school” or being placed with a relative. They won’t mind if you’re not giving them your attention as they grow up. After all, you’re doing this for them. Right?

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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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