When you’re carrying the love alone on Valentine’s Day

In my more cynical moments, I’ve suspected that Valentine’s Day owes its longevity less to romance than to a choreographed alliance between the greeting card, chocolate, and lingerie industries. The day has been thoroughly commercialized, and many men, myself included over the years, have approached it with well-intended but often ham-fisted earnestness.

Still beneath the marketing and the eye rolls, Valentine’s Day has come to serve as a pause for many couples. A moment, however imperfectly executed, to tend the fire of intimacy. Over time, lasting loves tend to look at it less as a performance and more as a reminder, a deliberate effort to say, “You matter to me,” even when the words come out crooked.

Common things are seldom viewed as precious. Only a deep bond leaves one person willing to shoulder what the other no longer can.

For family caregivers, however, Valentine’s Day carries a different weight altogether.

In my writing, I often focus on the broader applications of the lessons caregiving teaches. Sometimes though, it’s important to speak directly to a particular group. This is one of those times.

I’m talking about couples where one person is carrying more than their share of the relationship. Not because of indifference or neglect, but because the other, though still alive, is unable to do so. Dementia, disability, illness, injury, or unrelenting pain has shifted the balance. The love remains, but the weight cannot be borne evenly.

Holidays already do this to families. Christmas and Thanksgiving often force a reckoning with decline and loss. Valentine’s Day pierces a little deeper. It is intimate by design. And when one person must carry the relationship alone, the sadness can feel sharper, more personal, and harder to explain.

Caregiving requires reframing. Not denial or pretending. Not putting on a happy face. Reframing means stepping back far enough to see the relationship writ large, not merely through the narrow lens of present limitations. It means recognizing that the ache itself testifies to something rare.

Common things are seldom viewed as precious. Only an uncommon love produces this kind of sorrow. Only a deep bond leaves one person willing to shoulder what the other no longer can.

Over the years, I’ve offered a suggestion that sometimes catches people off guard. “It is OK for caregivers to buy their own Valentine’s Day card.”

Choose the one your husband or wife would have picked for you if they could. At this point in your life together, you already know the words. You’ve learned them through years of shared history, private humor, ordinary sacrifice, and quiet fidelity. Find the card that says what your spouse would have said, and mail it to yourself. Not as an exercise in self-pity, but as a tribute to the love you share.

I remember the first time I mentioned this on the air many years ago. When I finished, I glanced through the studio glass and saw tears filling my producer’s eyes. He was caught in a hard place, married to someone struggling with alcoholism. It is a chronic impairment, one that quietly turns a spouse into a caregiver, though few people think to call it that. He understood immediately what I meant. Not the card itself, but the recognition of love still present when reciprocity has gone missing.

Fix your spouse's favorite meal, even if you have to help them eat it. Set the table, even if there is only one place setting that feels fully present. Play the song you once danced to or hummed together through the years.

Pining over what is no longer possible can undo a caregiver. But choosing instead to rest in the magnitude of a love that inspires such devotion can steady you. That choice does not eliminate the tears. Nothing in this life will, and that is not a bad thing.

Some things are heartbreaking because they are too beautiful for our hearts to contain this side of heaven. “Sadness” is too small a word for that kind of ache.

Near the end of “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” C.S. Lewis gives Lucy a moment of language-defying clarity when she catches a glimpse of Aslan’s country. Struggling to explain what she feels, all she can say is, “It would break your heart.” When someone asks whether she means that it is sad, Lucy answers, “No,” because what she has seen is not tragic at all. It is simply too glorious for her heart to hold.

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This is where scripture speaks with quiet authority. The Christian promise is not that God will make all new things, discarding what was. The promise is that He will make all things new. The love you lived, the faithfulness you showed, the care you gave, none of it is wasted.

So this coming Valentine’s Day, if you find yourself in a hospital room, an assisted-living facility, a nursing home, or at your own kitchen table with only one place setting that feels fully occupied, allow the tears to come. Read the card your spouse would have sent. Eat the meal you would have shared. Listen to the music that once marked your life together.

And set another card on the table, the one you would choose for the person who changed your life so profoundly that you now carry the love entrusted to you when he or she no longer can.

Remember this as well. There is one who loves you both more fiercely than our hearts can understand. He sees every tear. He keeps account of every sacrifice. And He will indeed make all things new.

As scripture reminds us, “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12).