ArcaMax

You can tell Valentine's Day was designed with women in mind because there is no holiday meal for Mom to cook.

Thanksgiving and Christmas both have women out in the kitchen baking animals or parts of an animal. In a lot of households, it's a woman who makes the Super Bowl wings and things.

On Valentine's Day, the tradition is to free your best-loved female from the kitchen and take her out to eat, or at least to pitch chocolates down her throat while she sits comfortably in a wingback chair binge-watching "Gilmore Girls."

And it's not just wives. Even the girlfriend, particularly the long-term or live-in girlfriend, is probably doing more slicing, boiling, defrosting and microwaving than she did the first week you were dating her.

"Hey, it's just microwaving," you say.

"If it's so easy, why ain't you doing it?" I answer.

You want to know what it's like being a woman the rest of the year?

I went to get a haircut not long ago.

"Trim my beard short," I told the barber. "Don't line it up, either. I'm not gonna keep that up. I don't know how some guys do it."

"You know the guys that have those narrow beards, like a quarter-inch along the jaw?" my barber said.

"Yeah," I told him. "I couldn't keep that up for a week."

"A lot of guys, their girls do it for 'em," he said.

I thought about that while the guy trimmed my beard down to stubble.

How does that conversation start?

"Hey, honey," the guy says. "After you get through making dinner and you put the kids to bed and we have sex, come over here and shave me."

I don't know who to feel sorry for in that relationship.

I'm a big boy. I comb my own hair, I trim my own beard, I brush my own teeth, and my wife doesn't have to chew my food for me and then spit it into my mouth like I'm a baby bird.

I'm semiretired. My wife is still working. She makes dinner unless she doesn't feel like making dinner. I make my own breakfast and my own lunch. I do dishes. I empty litter boxes. I do laundry.

And I'm still a man. I can tell by the way I walk.

What do you get your "girl" or wife for Valentine's Day if she's been shaving you for several years?

My advice is to buy her a Mercedes and then leave her. Maybe she'll do better next time.

Around three weeks before Valentine's Day, I went to a cunning little gift and imported grocery store that serves coffee in the front of the building. I did an espresso like you'd do a shot of whiskey and hit the store running.

I bought things I knew she'd like, knickknacks and imported foods.

The trick to buying presents for people is to buy them stuff that's a lot like the stuff they already have because if they didn't like the stuff they already have, they wouldn't have that stuff, so more stuff like it is probably the stuff to buy.

I don't know if you can say "I love you" with a little bird carved out of wood and some groceries from countries where they like soccer, but it's stuff she likes.

And I love her like I never loved anyone in my life.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.