You can’t get away from all the paraphernalia about love and romance on Valentine’s Day. If you know your partner is cheating, this holiday will bring up all kinds of negative feelings whether or not he does anything to celebrate the day with you. In some ways the slimebag is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. If he wishes you a happy Valentine’s Day and gives you a card and gifts it will seem like a hollow gesture, as you know you’re no longer truly his Valentine. If following the discovery of his infidelity, you and your husband are no longer sleeping together, his card will seem doubly ironic. Yet if he ignores Valentine’s Day, this makes it clear he doesn’t think about you at all and that the other woman is the object of his affections. All kinds of unpleasant questions may churn away in your thoughts. Has he sent her a card and gifts? Does he love her rather than you? Is there any point in continuing the marriage?
If you’ve reacted to his infidelity by finding yourself another guy, you might be fortunate enough to get all the romantic attention you need. He may be showering you with physical affection and erotic love letters your husband would never send you even when your marriage was going well. I even recently came across a weird situation where the husband and wife were both monogamous—but with other people. However, re-entering the dating pool on the rebound can be a very difficult thing to do successfully. Many cheated-upon women are reluctant to open themselves up to further heartbreak. More often than not, the cheater’s wife is left alone while her horrible husband is off philandering.
I celebrated one Valentine’s Day by going to see stand-up comedy as I believe that laughter is the best way to banish the blues. The main comedian there was Maureen Langan who hails from New Jersey and is in her mid-fifties. She bemoaned the fact that any old man who’s moderately well off and especially if he’s famous, can always replace his wife with a younger, prettier model. She added that even a guy who’s totally paralyzed and in a wheelchair could do it—here she was referring to renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. Even though he was unable to move, he was able to leave. He traded in his first wife for one of his nurses, though that marriage also ended in divorce. Maureen claimed that as a highly educated, middle-aged woman who knew about the proper use of a semi-colon, her days for romance were over, unless she found herself a milky-eyed septuagenarian with too much arthritis in his neck to even be able peer over his shoulder at other women. Men of her age would be out trolling for young babes. Maureen advised young women not to waste their time going to college, “When I had the body to dance with poles, I was out developing my mind. Stupid, stupid.”
Valentine’s Day is now a Hallmark Holiday where you buy cards and candies for your children and their classmates as well as your significant other, or in the case of a cheater, others. Back in the Stone Age when I was a young girl living in London, Valentine’s Day was never for kids. None of this buying Valentine’s Day cards for everyone in your 2nd Grade class and having to sign your name on all of them. Instead you gave a card to someone you had the hots for, and you sent it unsigned and anonymous. The recipient was supposed to work out who had sent it. If you were already in a relationship the sender would normally be obvious. But I remember being mortified to receive a Valentine’s Day card when I was in High School that said, “Be my Valentine……….Or I’ll tell everybody you’re a virgin!” I later worked out that it came from a girl in my class who was supposed to be my best friend. Clearly I had been laboring under a misapprehension there.