Love notes

When a Valentine's day card is... more than a card

Heart shaped jam tarts I found in my photos, these were not made for Valentine’s day btw! ​

My first Valentine's day card ever was from my husband. We met and married within six months and at some point I told him how much I’d hated Valentine’s when I was younger, and then older and single, because I knew I’d never, ever, get anything; not that I wanted anything tacky anyway. We mutually agreed that we wouldn't make Valentine's a big deal when it rolled around, it being such a cliché and what not.

But he still got me a card on our first Valentine’s together, by which time we were married; a teeny tiny little notecard, small enough to tuck inside the red purse I bought in Rome on our honeymoon, which is where I keep it. It actually meant quite a lot to me, and still does, to have something sweet from him written in his hand even though my children would be the first to tell you how terrible his handwriting is. We met online, which you'll maybe know if you ever read my memoir. We spent our whirlwind romance communicating by text and email, both before and during our early relationship and though those emails felt like letters, at least the second half of those six months was spent appeasing my family which slightly detracted from everything. I guess everything happened so fast we didn't have the luxury of writing and sending love notes and sweet nothings by hand, which makes me a little sad, now I stop to think about it. Which is why I'll confess I do still love that he'll still get me a Valentine's card even though we both agreed we're not going to.

I never had a Valentine's day card before I got married. Is that weird? It certainly made me feel weird, for a long time. Lord knows, I wanted one by the time I was old enough to know what one meant. I have this memory of reading some teenage paperback novel when I was probably younger than the intended audience, and in the story a boy left a Valentine’s card at a girl’s front door and it was wild to me that she didn’t have to hide it from her parents. Besides I didn't know any boys like that anyway; if I so much as talked to a boy, you'd better believe that the Pakistani aunties would talk about it too. I went to a girls' secondary school with a boys' school next door and lots of girls and boys knew each other and dated and made out in lunch hours in blindspots behind playing fields and so lots of girls received Valentine's day cards and there was some mildly semi-competitive swooning over them. We might have been at the same school, but I often felt so apart from everyone else, like the world I lived in was dialled down a notch into a different frequency, the radio airwaves interfering.

I like to buy Valentine's cards for my children now, because it appeals to my love of choosing pretty stationery and it feels like a sweet thing to do, though I tell them that I love them about a hundred times a day anyway. They like Valentine's cards which have funny word plays - like 'You've got a pizza my heart' or 'I love you from your head to-ma-toes' (which I accidentally bought two years in a row) - and I just think it's kind of cute. I like the idea that one day when they are much, much older, they might remember that we did this. It did however also occur to me that perhaps there's a part of me who is buying these cards for my teenage self as much as for my children, making up for lost time, in a way.

Anyway, Valentine’s cards don’t really mean anything, we all know that! We all know that love is in the little things and that love can be more than just romantic. I wrote in my memoir that it’s ‘in the ordinariness of the everyday that the steadfastness of love is revealed.’ It’s in cups of tea and dinner in the oven and fixing the heating and noticing you need new gloves or socks and then buying them without fanfare, all of those ordinary things that we don’t even register, that we don’t even realise are little bits of love at the time that they happen, but it’s also, well, in my case anyway, in a card that you write and leave on a pillow on a certain day in a certain month because she never got one when everyone else did.

With love as always, regardless of what you do or don’t do today, and thank you for reading,

Huma x