How to Give Yourself the Best Valentine’s Day Gift Ever!

Written by Barb Greenberg, Rediscovering U

The onslaught of Valentine’s Day marketing has begun, and big red hearts are appearing everywhere. For those of us divorcing, divorced, or at the end of a longterm relationship, the world seems dedicated to celebrating everything we have lost, and we no longer qualify for this celebration. It’s as if we’ve lost our membership to an exclusive country club. “Sorry you just don’t belong here any more.”

To participate in this holiday we are expected to have a loving and generous partner, and that is exactly what we are grieving. We ache for a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on, someone who loves us when we haven’t showered and our hair is sticking straight up, when our breath is bad and we have spinach in our teeth, when we make a wrong decision, or can’t make a decision, when we lose our job, lose the race, lose our car keys, or lose our mind.…sometimes all in one day.

We may hope for another partner to come along with reservations for an intimate candlelight dinner, who brings us red roses, chocolate, and some great jewelry.

Or we may be thrilled if someone simply appears at our door with a pint of hot fudge ripple ice cream and a soup spoon, and entertains us by cleaning the house and doing all the laundry.

And sadly, for those of us who have felt so terribly alone during our past relationship, expecting anything from a partner seems a wasted effort.

Just because we have no Valentine at the moment, doesn’t mean we can’t still forget about cleaning the house and doing the laundry and instead buy ourselves flowers and chocolate, go out to dinner with a good friend.

But this just doesn’t seem fair. We want to stomp our feet and hold our breath until we turned blue. We cry, “This is not how things were supposed to be. I followed all the rules. I was nice. I recycled. I kept my teeth and my laundry white. I want my Valentine back!”

When we are honest with ourselves we realize the the price we had paid to be in this relationship was too dear. To get along with our partner we often gave up pieces of ourselves, denied a part of our soul. We accepted the rude comments, the thoughtless gestures and the painful verbal or physical abuse. We stopped listening to our intuition, because we were told over and over that what we heard or sensed was wrong, and we became disconnected from ourselves. We could no longer hear our the voice whispering, “Something is wrong. Something is not safe.”

It is time to let go of how we think things should be, so we can receive greater gifts than we could ever imagine. We can begin to rediscover our our voice, our spirit, our heart, our Self.

We each have an inner Valentine waiting for us, her arms filled with beautifully wrapped gifts of kindness, compassion and joy.