Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Set the bar low for Valentine's Day

Hey, fellas.

As a man who's been married for more than 20 years, I've got some Valentine's Day advice for you.

Don't set the bar too high too fast.

How do I know this? Because I set the bar too high too fast.

I blame the U.S. Army.

When I asked Bess to marry me, I'd just finished Officer's Basic Course in Arizona and was on leave here in the Chattahoochee Valley. We went to dinner and a movie, which is a standard American date.

I have no idea where we went to dinner, but I'll never forget that the movie was "Dances With Wolves," one of the longest films in cinematic history.

I spent most of those four hours checking to see if the ring, the most expensive thing I'd ever bought in my life, was still in the pocket of my blue jeans.

Otherwise, my name would have been Loses Ring in Dark.

The evening was a success, of course, because she said yes, but as a romantic event planner I'd left some room for improvement. And that was a good thing.

Then the Army sent me to Germany, and five months later we got married and Bess joined me there.

That's when I started to raise the bar high and fast. We were living in Europe and we didn't have children. We spent our first Christmas Eve in Switzerland. We spent our first anniversary in Paris.

And we spent our first Valentine's Day at the Winter Olympics in the French Alps.

If we'd been in America, we'd have probably waited for a table in some chain restaurant like Olive Garden and then gone out to see "Silence of the Lambs," the hot movie at the time, which would have been a mistake because Bess hates creepy movies.

And today, if we remembered it at all, it would have been because I'd made a mistake that was so bad it was funny, kind of like when I gave Bess a vacuum cleaner for Christmas.

But I didn't make a mistake. I took my new wife to the freaking Winter Olympics in the French Alps.

We had beautiful snowy picnics with real pastries and great hot chocolate. We watched speed skating and ice hockey and bobsledding with Herschel Walker. We cheered for America but were thankful we weren't actually there.

That's what I remember about our first Valentine's Day. I was telling the kids about it the other day, and Bess said that wasn't what she remembers the most.

She said she remembers that on the long trip from Germany to Albertville I gave her an envelope filled with tiny hearts that I'd cut out of construction paper.

"I did that?" I said.

"You did that?" the kids said.

"He did that," Bess said.

See what I mean? Don't set the bar too high.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, at dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com.

This story was originally published February 13, 2015 at 10:53 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Set the bar low for Valentine's Day."