Valentine's Day the Contrarian Way

"Pretend you don't know each other":  My husband has been doing this for the past four years.  Unfortunately, he missed the fact that it's "role playing" and he's still acting the part of nonhusband.

Valentine's day is one of the days I enjoy letting the horses run. Once I spent 3 hours at the Hallmark Store and bought a bag full of Valentines, each odd  and all different, that I taped up all through the house and garage. Instead of signing each one I wrote directions to the next card and created a pathway through our property that looked like the dotted line in the old Family Circle "Jeffy Goes To The Store" comics. When she reached the end there was a bouquet of roses, a note asking if she'd go to dinner with me and tickets to an event she really wanted to attend but decided was too expensive. I'm the Now-Not Now poster child and we've been married 35 years, so in the grand tradition of "no good deed goes unpunished" each Feb. 14 starts out something like "...hey... what day is this? Really? No way! Oh man -- I'm going to have to leave a little early today..." followed by a mad scramble through the mall and some seriously stealthy old-guy-ninja moves trying not to get caught during the setup. All in all it's good fun and and it's one of the few (he really means "the only") annual events I've never missed. Which brings me to the reason for this post. In spite of the struggles with hyperfocusing and time awareness I've come to  really enjoy Valentine's Day. Why this day and not others? I love and cherish my wife and look forward to making her feel special and loved, but unlike her birthday and our anniversary Feb 14 is one of the few days I don't have to watch myself so closely. I don't have to go to extra lengths to do the little things that come so easily to normals, but that I'm not wired for. Valentine's Day for my wife isn't unique and special because I did a good job managing my disability, but because of my disability. Take a giant step back and read what 's been posted to this site and others. A multitude of coping skills aimed at helping men with ADD avoid disrupting their wives and partners but very little aimed at helping them accept men with ADD as just one more of the many facets of normal. I know I'm stepping onto unsteady ground here, it's easy to dismiss a post like this as denial or "defending the behaviors", or in the worst, misogynist. That's not my intent. One thing I've learned from living with my wife for so long is that the things I've had to learn about my brain wiring to keep from damaging our shared time and space are more like compromises than therapies. I like it better that way. There's no stigma attached to compromising. A good compromise is a shared event between equals that requires both sides to be willing to yield to gain, and if done well it brings both closer to each other. 

R