Valentine’s Day has a way of bypassing logic and going straight to the tender places.

Even when nothing is technically wrong.
Even when the circumstances make sense.
Even when life, on the surface, feels full.

Years ago, before Michael and I were engaged, Valentine’s Day arrived while we were dating. He had already committed to a ski trip with his daughter and was clear about it. I understood. I accepted it. Intellectually, it was reasonable and clean.

And still, something inside of me quietly unraveled.

I was out of town myself, traveling with my daughter to visit colleges. I was sharing a hotel room with another mother and her daughter. There was companionship, purpose, movement. Nothing about the moment suggested loss.

Yet as the day shifted into evening, I felt emotionally unmoored.

Not in a way that was visible to anyone else.
Not dramatically.
But internally, it was hard to stay present.

A part of me was waiting for something — a gesture, a message, a signal. Candy. Flowers. Romance. Some external acknowledgment that this day, and by extension I, mattered.

It didn’t come.

What surprised me wasn’t the desire itself. It was the depth of the reaction. I remember realizing I didn’t even trust myself to send a text. Not because connection wasn’t welcome, but because I could feel how easily I might reach from a place that wasn’t grounded.

So I stayed still. I moved through the night without acting on the story forming in my mind. I didn’t sabotage anything. I didn’t turn the moment into a confrontation or a conclusion.

But I was struck by how far my inner world had traveled from the facts.

That moment had little to do with Michael.
It had everything to do with meaning.

Valentine’s Day carries a powerful cultural imprint. It compresses desire, worth, belonging, and reassurance into a single symbolic moment. When that symbol doesn’t arrive in the expected form, the nervous system can interpret absence as significance — not because it is, but because it has been taught to.

This pattern — the way love becomes tied to being chosen — is something I unpack more fully in Engaged at Any Age, because it shows up everywhere once you start to see it.

What surfaced for me that night was an old pattern. A place where love had once been measured by being pursued, affirmed, or demonstrated through gesture. A place where a single day could quietly become a verdict.

Seeing that clearly was sobering.

Not because it made me cynical about romance, but because it revealed how easily peace can be outsourced — to a holiday, to expectation, to someone else’s behavior. How quickly perception can narrow when emotion takes the lead.

The shift that followed wasn’t dramatic. There was no immediate insight or resolution. Just a growing awareness of how important it is to be able to stay with oneself when disappointment brushes up against longing.

That is the part of love that rarely gets named.

Not the fireworks.
Not the romance.
But the capacity to remain present when an old ache stirs — without collapsing into story or self-abandonment.

Valentine’s Day doesn’t create these moments. It reveals them.

And when it does, it offers a quiet invitation: not to harden, not to detach, but to bring curiosity and compassion to the places that still expect love to arrive from the outside.

If this reflection feels familiar, the stories in Engaged at Any Age offer a deeper companion for women navigating these same inner landscapes.

This year, when I think of being love bombed, I don’t think of intensity or grand gestures.

I think of something steadier.

The kind of love that doesn’t disappear when expectations go unmet.
The kind that stays.
The kind that can hold tenderness without urgency.

That kind of love changes how everything is seen.