Before you know it, Valentine’s Day will be here. A time of love. A time of romance. A time of enormous profits for flower shops, greeting card and perfume companies and the advertising agencies connected with them. Pretty soon we will be deluged with a plethora of newspaper ads, radio and television commercials and banner equipped bi-planes, reminding us of how much we care about our significant other.

Resisting the risk of being labeled a “sexist,” I will give two examples of these ads guaranteed to trap you into turning over your wallet to a salesperson, because of their ads aimed directly at your sentimentality factor. The first is a cologne advertisement showing a scantly clad young lady holding a bottle of this swill with the caption, “Show him how much you care this Valentine’s Day.” This ad is two-fold:

1. It shows the men reading the ad that scantly clad women make great Valentine’s gifts. And,
2. It gives women a wonderful serving suggestion when it comes time to present the gift.

The other ad is for an extremely expensive fine gem that injects the subliminal message into the already mashed potato remains of the male cerebellum, “Tell her you’d marry her all over again.” I have a feeling that the slogan is not complete and should probably read, “Tell her you’d marry her all over again, just as soon as you get out of the poor house.”

Keeping these two slogans in mind, let’s take a look at the past year and see which situation clearly matches the appropriate slogan.

Okay, ladies first. Can you honestly say that the words, “Let me show him how much I care this Valentine’s Day,” were the exact words that went through your mind when he decided to clean that four-barrel carburetor on the kitchen counter that you just spent all morning cleaning?

Guys, would you really ask her to marry you all over again after you discovered that she used your three-wood to kill a spider in the bathtub? (Especially, when everybody knows that a bathtub spider is a five iron shot.)
Ladies, after he went to his twentieth year college class reunion, told his class chums that he could drink as much as he could back in “the old days,” and then proved it by consuming the equivalent of Lake Erie, only to come home and pass out, while praying to the Porcelain Princess? Can you honestly say that dressing in a scantly clad costume and presenting the “love of your life” with a bottle of expensive cologne was numero uno in your mind?

Guys, how about when you came home after a hard day at work, sat for two hours in traffic that moved about as quickly as a supermarket express lane, only to witness her snaking the kitchen drain with your new two hundred dollar fishing rod, because she wouldn’t spend the three dollars on Drano? Was giving her an expensive piece of jewelry the uppermost priority on your agenda?

And ladies, be honest, how much did you really want to show him how much you care when you discovered that he used the only known copy of your videotaped wedding to record the finals of the Monster Truck and Tractor Pull Rally on the All Redneck Channel?

And guys, were the words, “I think I’ll marry her all over again” on your lips after she let the kids eat ice cream cones in the back seat of your shiny new BMW and then tried to clean the mess by running your pride and joy through the car wash with the back windows down? I think not.

So, before you spend the kids’ college tuition on a gift of love, let’s weigh the good versus the bad and draw a sensible conclusion. Is he or she really worth it?