In case you missed it, Week 1 of creating your own particular Lover’s Day was about investigating your own love and Week 2 was doing the (sometimes sneaky) research into what your Love loves. 

Now it’s time to put it all together. As I’ve said before, this isn’t limited to romantic love. You can create a Lover’s Day all on your own, either with some well-deserved self-love or towards some other person, place, or thing that you feel deserves your attention.

What goes into the creation of a Lover’s Day? Well, you could think of it in a couple of ways: Theme and Arc. Let’s take the Arc first:

In the Beginning:

How will your day start? Together? Separate? Will a text do, or do you need to arrange a singing telegram? Here’s a hint: simple is powerful. My partner, who often gets up much earlier than me, will leave out my coffee mug next to the coffee maker primed to go for when I get out of bed. On occasion, though, there’s also a little card or note with an I love you sentiment on it. Those are great mornings. You don’t have to do the dozen roses or anything close to that – what’s more important is that you distill your love down into its purest form and express that.

Then you have your “rising action.” How will the day progress? With a little luck you can keep adding in little tokens of affection, surprises here and there via the many forms of communication that the 21st century provides. Again, though, remember that different trumps same and tactile trumps digital. In other words, a real note beats a texted “LUV U MUCH”. An actual photograph will have more resonance than an image on the computer. It’s basic signal-to-noise: on a computer, only the eyes are engaged, and it’s within a medium (the screen) that moment to moment changes completely.

An actual photograph in-hand? Suddenly it’s not just visual stimuli, it’s also tactile. The picture has texture, it has a back (possibly with an additional message?), it occupies space and it does not change. This is a rare thing in our ephemeral digitalia, and you should make the most of it. If your lover’s day is devoted to some cause or pastime, your physical token can be something that simply reminds and represents to you what you love.

The purpose of the rising action is to build antici…*

Climax

The climax is where your homework really pays off. You know yourself and the object of your affections so well that you can give them something they never expected. Not because it’s necessarily expensive, or gaudy or complex, even. It is the thought that you put into it – the literal weeks of planning.

It may be a dinner, it may be dancing, it may be a wild game of cribbage. One thing I suggest: make it something where you’re facing each other. If you’re facing the same direction – say at a play, a concert, a movie – then there’s delayed interaction. Sure, there are good things about shared experiences – but this is about Creating Your Lover’s Day. That means that rather than passively receiving the experience, you create it together.

Caveat Amator

There’s one thing, one downside to the weeks of planning, that you need to watch out for. It may happen at the climax, it may happen after, it may happen much after: your expectations.

It’s impossible to get away from them entirely. If you’re putting care into crafting the day, you will of course be imagining what your lover will be responding with. You may have entire conversations in your head: “Oh, no, really, it wasn’t too much trouble – oh, I meant to take up ice sculpture anyway, and the bharatnatyam dancers were in town, after all…oh, shucks, I don’t know if I’m the Greatest Lover of All Time and Space, but I’m flattered…”

And then you get “Hey, that was nice.” And a kiss on the cheek as they pick up the remote.

This is why you need to leave your expectations at the door. You need to actually tell yourself: I am doing this for it’s own sake, not for some reaction. It can help to take some time to journal it, either before or after, writing down what you did, why you did it, how it made you feel at the time. Not how you felt after, because memory is a tricky thing, and it loves to warp and twist based on our moods.

Of course, that may not happen. Ideally your Lover’s Day has a graceful conclusion, a shared appreciation for what was created and maybe even some talk about where to go from there. This will be much easier if you include the idea of a theme throughout – which is something we’ll talk about in our final post of this series, just before the traditional (and oft-dreaded) V-day!