Valentine's Day celebration logistics create an impossible situation you're solving wrong. You have three major events crammed into five February days. Valentine's Day on the 14th. Your kid's birthday on the 17th. Your wife's birthday on the 19th. Your bank account is weeping. The practical solution is obvious: one nice dinner covers multiple occasions. You suggest the anniversary trip to Mexico counts. She says no. You propose the Dine Out Vancouver reservation counts as Valentine's dinner. She says no, that's the anniversary dinner. You're being efficient. She's being unreasonable. Except you're missing what she's actually saying.

Addison admits the real problem after 15 years of marriage: parenting becomes your life and you forget about the marriage. Date nights happen rarely now that their son is old enough to stay home alone. The attempt to consolidate celebrations isn't about money or logistics. It's the manifestation of forgetting about "us" while focusing on everything else. When you try to make one event cover multiple occasions, you're proving her point. She needs separate recognition because the relationship keeps getting folded into other priorities.

The timing problem reveals a maintenance problem. February stacks events together by accident. But the instinct to combine them shows how relationship priority works the rest of the year. You think you're being practical. She knows you're demonstrating exactly what she's worried about: that the marriage gets treated as the thing that can wait, the celebration that can be bundled, the event that doesn't need its own attention.

Topics: Valentine's Day logistics, marriage maintenance after kids, relationship priorities, combining celebrations, date night importance

GUEST: Bob Addison | @riobobbo

RUNDOWN: Bob Addison has three major events in five February days and explains why his wife won't accept his logical plan to combine celebrations, revealing what that refusal actually means about marriage maintenance during parenthood.