Last Valentine’s Day he hid a heart-shaped box of chocolates in my backpack. I wasn’t at all surprised because the gesture was a throwback from like 15 years ago when he hid a very similar heart-shaped box of chocolates in my locker as a way of asking me to be his girlfriend. I expected it but of course thought it was very sweet.
The surprising part came a little later when I came out of the bathroom and almost ran my 7 year old son over. He was standing there with a purple envelope held out and a big smile on his face. That was very cool and shocking and made me all teary and I loved it.
It’s important to me because nobody, not even my son’s father when we were still together, has ever really made an effort to help Alex get cards and things for me on holidays. My mom let him pick out this horrible sweater one Christmas and my sister picked up a Mother’s Day card when I was still pregnant with him. That’s pretty much it. And Alex was so happy and proud to give that card to me.
It took Ben probably 10 minutes and cost maybe five dollars and it is one of the coolest things anybody has ever done for me.
He cried tears of sheer joy when I told him that I was pregnant. At the time, I wasn’t sure how I felt about that (40 years old, unmarried, and an unplanned pregnancy? Ridiculous, scary, etc.) I sure as heck wasn’t sure how he’d feel about it. How many 41-year-old childless men would welcome that news? We had discussed getting married, even assumed marriage at some undecided point in the future, but a baby? At our ages?
Turns out, he was absolutely, utterly thrilled, and remains thrilled with fatherhood. He’s a great stepdad to my 12- and 9-year-olds. Even when I mentioned to him that we would soon have a household with a 16-year-old boy, a 13-year-old girl, and a 3-year-old girl, he only developed a mild nervoud tic!
Not the most moving but the most recent was this past Valentine’s Day.
I walked in to find a big red heart-shaped candy box on the table. Now, I’m not very fond of chocolate (It’s okay but only in small doses. I much prefer something savory,) so I’m wondering why he would waste money on a big container of chocolates since I won’t eat them.
Then I open it. He has gone to a local shop and purchased several varieties of cheeses he thinks I will like, broken them into small chunks and replaced the chocolates with bits of the cheeses!
I was touched that he would go through that kind of trouble for a romantic Valentine’s gift. (Of course, then he got to split the chocolates with Emmy so it was a win for everyone!)
When we had known each other less than a year, my grandfather was dying and I had hit a little bump in the road in my career and had no money. She bought me an airplane ticket to go see him. I didn’t ask for it. It indeed turned out to be the last time I ever saw him. We were particularly close.
Ha, I kept the first note my fiance ever gave me for the same reason. It was on our first “official” date, and he’d brought me a gift bag with a pretentious art film from the 1980s I’d said I wanted to see but was having trouble tracking down. The note read, “I suppose flowers were the appropriate gift, but then what would the patriarchy think. So… this instead.” That was when I realized he was pretty much perfect for me.
The act that moved me most was definitely either that, or the time about six weeks into our relationship that I had an anxiety attack at work, came home to his house (it being closer to get to), threw up on his floor and fell asleep on his bed. I woke up to him cheerfully scrubbing the puke out of the carpet and whistling under his breath. That’s when I thought we might get married.
Hee. My SO kept our emails, too, from a little over 3 years ago. In his case I think it’s mostly that he just doesn’t delete email. Ever.
There’s never been a grand gesture in our relationship, but I was moved by something small he did at a pub a couple of years ago. We had ordered some nachos and he asked for no guacamole (I’m allergic to avocado). It sounds like nothing special, but to me it was the first real sign that he knew me, that he remembered important details about me that nobody else would care about.
After my husband died, a Columbia House cd came for him. “Great,” I thought. “Something else I have to pay for or send back and GRR!” I just dropped it on my desk at work and thought I’d deal with it eventually.
Months passed. My birthday rolled around and for some reason that was the day I decided I would deal with the cd, so I opened it. He had bought it for me, based on a conversation we had had months before he died. It was a great gift, and it broke my heart.
My boyfriend found out that Subway was selling my favorite cookies–snickerdoodles. He found my local Subway, called them from the other side of the country, made sure they had snickerdoodles, found out their hours, then told me. He thought it was just something minor, but to me it was an amazingly thoughtful gesture, all the more precious because it was about something small and, to most people, inconsequential.
When we were engaged: I was going to a convention in Philadelphia, and decided to take a train. I had never been on a train. I parked my car in my office parking deck and took a taxi to the tiny train station, planning to do the reverse on the way home.
The return train was hours and hours late, and I was exhausted. It was supposed to get in at 10 p.m. or so, and it was at least 2 a.m. by the time we finally got in. I staggered off the train with my bags, miserable with the prospect of having to call a cab, ride to my car, drive home and fall down in bed. I knew it would be at least another hour. I was walking toward the station, not really looking where I was going and I ran right into him. He took my big bag with one hand, and with the other handed me flowers. I fell to my knees and cried right there in the parking lot.
He had been sitting there in the station with dozens of Amish people for three hours waiting for a late train, just so he could surprise me and I wouldn’t have to take a cab. He drove me to my car and followed me home before he went home to get about two hours of sleep before he had to get up for work the next day.
He keeps my first-grade picture and a certified copy of our marriage license in his wallet.
I’ve been seeing my SO for about 6 months now. He’s recently out of a divorce from a marriage which, he explained, was so bad for the past few years that he just threw himself into work and never looked back. He’s now an EVP at a publicly-traded company. He’s always “on call”. Once, to my horror, he even answered a work call in the middle of us having sex (he’s never done that again). He admitted to me, when we talked about it, that there’s nothing in his life that he would be doing- save sex with me, NOW- where he wouldn’t answer a business call.
As our relationship progresses, I can see him s-l-o-w-l-y move towards NOT treating work like a man in an unhappy marriage, i.e., taking clear priority over everything.
The other night, a couple weeks ago, we had a pretty intense sexual experience, and it really wound me up. I woke up the next morning, he was heading out for a doctor’s appointment and then to work, and I just started sobbing. I couldn’t pull myself together. He stayed as long as he could with me and then left for his doctor’s appointment (a specialist he has to schedule months in advance- I didn’t blame him). He said he’d come back after the doctor, if he could. An hour later, I’m still crying, and I get a text message saying he had to go to work- he’s in meetings all day and wishes he could come but can’t spare the time and don’t I feel better by now? Argh! I didn’t feel any better and I told him that.
15 minutes later, I hear the key in the door, and in he comes with a handful of contracts. He’d walked out of a meeting, upon getting my texts, to come sit with me. He spent an hour with me, until I felt better, and then went back to work.
In August 2008 after dating and living together for almost two years, my then-boyfriend and I were kinda-sorta-well-maybe kicking around the idea of getting engaged. Our future was very uncertain at the time and he wanted to wait until things stabilized somewhat. I agreed to that without a fuss, but proactively asked my mom if we had any old family rings that we could reuse as an engagement ring. She found an old, beat up yellow gold ring that originally had three diamonds but only one was left. I offhandedly mentioned this to my b/f, then we both promptly forgot about it and carried on with life.
Fast forward about a month. My boyfriend went on a tour of Canada with his band but I couldn’t go because of my work schedule. We were both disappointed but agreed that it would be no big deal. When he got home, the very first thing he did was hug me tight, then he told me that he missed me so much while on tour that he knew that the thing he had to do next was the only right thing to do. Then he pulled that old ring out of his pocket, slid it onto my finger and asked me to spend my life with him as his wife. It was such a surprise because I thought the subject wouldn’t be brought up again for many, many months. We got married last September despite the fact that our lives were still in chaos. But he’s been such a rock that we’ve been able to get through some extremely stressful stuff and still be blissfully happy together. Sigh. Typing this makes me want to go to his jobsite and hug his socks off.