First Posted: 2/18/2014

Another year of Valentine’s has come and gone. Flowers have been delivered and chocolates have been eaten. Some people got engaged, others married, and some sat at home with their cats and Netflix accounts.

My Valentine’s Day this year was a delight. I spent it with my boyfriend, we had a nice dinner, he gave me flowers and candy, and I thought it was great. He, on the other hand, thought it was an epic failure.

He suffers from romantic illusions of grandeur. He always builds up giant, fantastic ideas in his head, and when they don’t go as perfectly as planned, his mood deflates and he feels like a failure (which couldn’t be farther from the truth).

This goes for all holidays, date nights, dinners, etc. I love him for it, but I feel that he always sets himself up for disappointment. He is always trying to create the perfect movie moment. He wants to be Jake Ryan with a birthday cake or Johnny Castle bursting through the door telling you not to put Baby in a corner.

Reality tends to fall short. It’s not a movie and, in my case, I suffer from chronic bad luck and cynicism. The cake would likely give me food poisoning and I’d be up all night vomiting in the bathroom; sorry, Jake Ryan. The bigger an idea you build in your mind, chances are, the bigger the opportunity is for it to blow up in your face.

So some minor detail didn’t pan out right. In our case, a snowstorm stopped him from decorating my desk at work with all sorts of love stuff. While the idea is incredibly sweet, I was just as happy to have the opportunity to spend the night together.

Some people would choose to blame this on the chaos theory. You try so hard to have control over every aspect to make sure it goes perfect, but life happens and sometimes things fall beyond your control. I prefer to blame my luck on Murphy’s law. If it can go wrong, it will. You would think, after all this time, he would have learned this about me by now and would cut back on the big plans, but being the hopeless romantic that he is, he still keeps chugging along with the romantic gestures.

We may not ever get to Hollywood and Baby might have to stay in her corner. I just hope he knows that everything is appreciated and I am happy to report that, at least in our case, chivalry and romance isn’t dead. I hope you all are as lucky to find someone who never stops trying, despite Murphy and his law book.