Behind the Blog 39: It's The Little Things That Matter

Behind The Blog is a meme to help bloggers connect their life and interests to the content showcased on their blog. The co-hosts Faye Kathe and Melissa will provide a different topic, idea, or question every week that bloggers can relate to themselves and the books, films, or media they find interesting!

Gestures of Love:

With it being Valentine's Day this week, we wanted to ask about gestures of love. Do you appreciate grand gestures, ie, being lavished with gifts, and chocolates, romantic getaways etc. Or do you appreciate the smaller things, like your bf/gf doing something for you without being asked, a homecooked meal, etc. If you'd like, you can share what you did/will do to celebrate Valentine's Day.

In relation to books and media:

What are some gestures of love, grand or small that have stuck out to you in books or movies? 

I'm definitely a small gestures kind of girl. I'm pretty simple and it doesn't take much to make me happy. A few of my best valentine's days have been spent with pizza, wine,  and a movie. 

That's not to say that more grand gestures aren't nice, they definitely are, and they do have their place, but I'm more about quality over quantity. I'm honestly just happy with a card on Valentine's day. I don't care for flowers, and chocolate is always good, but I can never manage to eat it all, no matter how good it is.  I'm much happier with a homecooked meal, and a night in, snuggled on the couch than I ever would be at a fancy restaurant.

And I'm more about the simple gestures all year round, not just on Valentine's day. The idea behind Valentine's Day is nice, don't get me wrong, but I really don't think that we need a specific day of the year to tell a significant other that we love them. We should be telling them that every day, not just when society (and Hallmark) says we should. And I'm not just saying that because I'm slightly bitter about the fact that I won't get to spend Valentine's day with my boyfriend, either. 

Since I don't have any plans to share with you guys of what I'm doing for this Valentine's Day, I'll share a little mishap I had with a Valentine's Day from a couple of years ago. Since it was the first one that Dearran and I got to spend together, I wanted to do something special for him. If you've been a long time reader of the blog, you'll know that I love to bake.

So, on this particular Valentine's Day, I decided to make him cherry cheesecake. Simple enough, right? Well, it would have been, had we had an easier to use can opener. At the time (although I've since made him buy another one,) Dearran only had what I would call an old fashioned can opener. These can openers are definitely not user friendly, at least not for me. They have to be placed on the lid just so, and they can be hard to grip and turn. When I was trying to open the can of cherry pie filling, it kept slipping off, so the can wouldn't open smoothly. I tried for almost an hour to get the can open, wasting precious prep time, and not having the cheesecake ready in time. I had to beg Dearran to stay late at the office to give me more time to get things ready. 

Eventually, I got the can open enough to get the filling out, got the cheesecake finished and managed to do a spectacularly bad makeup job on myself (I don't wear makeup that often so I'm not good at applying it.) 

And in the end, everything turned out all right. Dearran appreciated the cheesecake, and laughed with me when I told him how much effort went into it. And it's times like these that matter to me the most. Because in the end, it's not about the lavish gifts, or flowers, or chocolate, those are all things that don't really last. But  it is about the memories and the laughter. So it really is all about the little things.

In relation to books and media:

The only gesture of love (and I'm not eve sure this counts as a gesture of love...) that's coming to mind at the moment is the scene in The Breakfast Club where they're getting picked up at the end of the movie. It's the scene where Claire gives Bender one of her earrings, and he puts it in his ear. That's a simple gesture, but it really has significant meaning after the conclusions they've come to about each other over the course of the day.

What about you, are you more of a grand or a small gesture type of person?

Please share your thoughts!

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