According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion Valentine cards are sent each year; 85 percent of them are purchased by women.

Yet it’s men who feel most of the pressure to spend money, sometimes lots of it, because their wife or girlfriend takes this day very seriously.

Neil Chethik, author of “VoiceMale: What Husbands Really Think About Their Marriages, Their Wives, Sex, Housework and Commitment” says that men “would love it if the day just went away. Men feel a lot of pressure on Valentine’s Day. Our culture says: ‘What did he do for you for Valentine’s Day?’ It’s kind of a status symbol.”

Come on, admit it. We women know it’s true. If our man forgets Valentine’s Day (how could he with all the cultural reminders, but some of them do), we’re upset and take it as a sign that he doesn’t love us, hasn’t got a romantic bone in his body and doesn’t care about our feelings. In fact, half of the women surveyed by Match.com said receiving nothing for the holiday could be grounds for a breakup.

Valentine’s Day is a marketing triumph that has bewitched both sexes over the ages. Even though we know that expected generosity and gifts are insincere, women continue to want and even demand these gifts.

One of the myths of marriage is that husbands want romance as much as their wife does. Men ‘do’ romance because it fulfills our need, not his. He uses romance to set the stage for what he really wants – sex, closeness, intimacy.

He’s being smart. He’s using strategy to get what he wants. Coming through on Valentine’s Day is a win/win. We women are reassured that the realities of marriage haven’t extinguished our yearning for romance. The symbols of love become the actions of love, or as Marshall McLuhan observed in the sixties, “The medium is the message”.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 10:56 am. Visit the archives for all blog posts.