Imagine, If You Will, a Valentine for Your Heart’s Content

H ow do they love each other? Let them count the ways: By the way they dress, the little things they say and do, the trinkets they exchange. With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, we decided to take a look at how couples put a little spice in their love lives . . . .

SHE: I don’t want much for Valentine’s Day--just the gooiest, frilliest valentine you can find, the freshest bouquet of flowers you can muster and supper in a quaint restaurant where I can sport that red velvet dress you say you like.

And for me--the setting, the where and how things are given--is everything. I’d love to find my valentine tucked into the toaster, for example, or the flowers lying on the front seat of my car before I go to work.

Don’t spend much--but, please--use some imagination in the way you give things.

HE: How about I hire Backward Skywriters Inc. to spell out “You Love I” above the I-5/57/22 interchange at rush hour?

Seriously, since we’re still economizing a bit, how about--instead of the entire outfit I was planning to get you before that trip to Vegas--I get you a really elegant Hermes scarf you can wear on our night out? Best scarves in the world, and they transform whatever you’re wearing.

But maybe I’d better tape the gloppy--oh, sorry, that was gooey , wasn’t it?--valentine to the Mr. Coffee instead. I put it in the toaster, you wake up bleary and turn the thing on and--well, in that context, hearts afire doesn’t seem like such a swell idea.

SHE: If you could afford to give a woman anything on Valentine’s Day, what would you give her? And if you could get anything you wanted on Valentine’s Day, what would you want?

HE: Wow, not one but two loaded questions! Lemme call my life insurance guy before I answer.

OK, as to the first: if I could afford to give a woman (gulp!) anything for Valentine’s Day, I think it’d have to be Belgium. Nice people, good food, lots of space for a tennis court. She’d love it.

For myself--again, anything I wanted--well, you know better than that. Apart from two weeks in a chalet in Val d’Isere with Candice Bergen, what else is there?

Alternatives from the real world: for her, I think I’d get a month of in-depth vegetating at any spot on the globe she chose. For me, I’d ask for precisely the same, with a complimentary Ferrari, the world’s most romantic form of high-velocity transportation.

Too much? Or are your valentine fantasies comparable?

SHE: Sticking with the real world: I’d give him a book of hand-bound love poetry penned by me. He’d find it inside a new leather golf bag, of course. And inside the book: tickets for two to Scotland to play the links and frolic in the heather.

For me: just a little trip to Paris with dinner on the Seine will do.

I guess I learned about the importance of Valentine’s Day from my father. He’d always give my mom a frilly, gooey valentine. She saved them all. (And I’ve kept them all.) She would absolutely flip over the beauty and sentiment of them.

I’ll take one very sincere valentine over all the countries in Western Europe.

HE: What about lingerie? Is that still considered to be in good Valentine’s Day taste? (I’m talking about the really top-drawer stuff, not the laugh-up-your-sleeve items.) Or is lingerie considered to be more of a gift that a man, figuratively, gives himself?

SHE: Lingerie is tricky. Remember, there’s no woman on Earth who can compete with the girlie magazine images of women airbrushed and made up to within an inch of their celluloid lives. Lingerie only exposes--emphasizes--the freckles, moles, pimples, cellulite and extra flesh that play havoc with real women . So give lingerie with a little laughter, lots of love and low expectations. Most women are terrified of not living up to a man’s dream of how they will look in the stuff.

Do men like shorts smothered in red hearts and kisses? Come on, tell me what real men want on Valentine’s Day.

HE: Most guys I know are suckers for silly underwear. Yeah, the ones with the red hearts and arrows and the semi-filthy little sayings. We’d never buy them for ourselves, and they act as a subtle hint that the loves of our lives admire more about us than our minds.

I got a pair of shorts once (no laughing, now) with a red apple stenciled over the fly and--she got them in New York--the words “The Big Apple” above it. And you think women have expectations to live up to?

SHE: Have you worn them?

HE: Let me answer a question with a question: Exactly how much guts do you think I have? Actually, I’ve worn them to great acclaim (read: hysterical, gulping laughter) precisely once. But maybe on Valentine’s Day . . . .