I kicked off the beginning of this year by celebrating my 10 year Wedding Anniversary, so as you can imagine ‘ROMANCE’ has been something that I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about lately. It is often interesting what people believe to be romantic. I think often as women we can conger up ideas of nice dinners, diamond rings, and being whisked away for the weekend to an island paradise. While these ideas are fabulous we usually wake up from our dream at this point and most of us would be happy with just the simple things. I think unfortunately Hollywood has a lot to answer for in creating our fanciful dreams and scaring a lot of males into a permanent state of stage fright and performance anxiety. Often I think men chose not to make the effort to be romantic as the risk of making an effort and disappointing is too great.As much as all women love romance and want it to be showered upon us I think sometimes we need to be the instigators, the one that demonstrates that it is mostly the simple things that we are after. By doing this, we give our men the confidence that we WILL notice their efforts and we WON’T jump down their necks and tell them all the ways they could have done it better.
I am very blessed to have a husband that has always been a giver of flowers. What’s more is he usually gives them for no particular reason. I love this about him. However as much as I love the flowers and his thoughtfulness I have often told him that the most romantic thing he could do for me is house work without being asked. Over the ten years that we have been married he has improved in this regard and even more so over the last several months as we prepare to have our first baby.
So for one of my to my husband for our anniversary I wanted to give my husband a romantic gift also stretched my creative muscles. This gift also tested out my memory banks as I created a small gift box of memories. The MEMORY BOX was a small gift box filled with squares cards, each with a hand written statement and drawing as a visual representation of what was written. The statements on the cards included ‘the places we have visited’ and cryptic comments like ‘when cricketers wore purple’. The best memory cards were those that were cryptic and depicted obscure memories. These caused the most laughs as we went through the box card by card reminiscing.
This was a really simple gift, however it did take time and thought. It is both time and thought that I think are the key elements of ROMANCE. Being generous with both of these things demonstrates to those in our world that they are valued. We can so easily take those we love for granted.
So, show that someone special in your life that you value them and do something romantic for them, but don’t forget to give your creative muscles a work out at the same time.
