“Before our 25th wedding anniversary, my husband sent 25 long-stemmed yellow roses to me at my office. A few days later, I plucked all the petals and dried them. On the night of our anniversary, I spread the petals over the bed and lay on top of them, wearing only a negligee.

As I’d hoped, I got a reaction from my husband.

When he saw me, he shouted, “Wow! Are those potato chips?””

“When I married my beautiful wife, I could get both hands around her waist,” said my husband’s grandfather. Pointing at his full-figured wife, he boasted, “Now look how much I got. That’s what I call an investment!”

On the first day of our marriage retreat, the instructor talked about the importance of knowing what matters to each other.

“For example,” he began, pointing to my husband. “do you know your wife’s favorite flower?”

He answered, “Gold Medal Self-Rising.”

“My grandmother told me how she ended up marrying Gramps. She was in her 20s, and the man she was dating left for war. “We were in love,” she recalled, “and wrote to each other every week. It was during that time that I discovered how wonderful your grandfather was.”

“Did you marry Gramps when he came home from the war?” I asked.

“Oh, I didn’t marry the man who wrote the letters. Your grandfather was the mailman.””

“My husband is wonderful with our baby, but often turns to me for advice. Recently I was in the shower when he poked his head in to ask, “What should I feed the baby for lunch?”

“That’s up to you,” I replied. “There’s all kinds of food. Why don’t you pretend I’m not home?”

A few minutes later, my cell phone rang. I answered it to hear my husband saying, “Yeah, hi, honey. Uh…what should I feed the baby for lunch?””

My cell phone quit as I tried to let my wife know that I was caught in freeway gridlock and would be late for our anniversary dinner. I wrote a message on my laptop asking other motorists to call her, printed it on a portable inkjet and taped it to my rear windshield.

When I finally got home, my wife gave me the longest kiss ever. “I know you love me,” she said. “At least 70 people called and told me so.”

“The wheel of my grocery cart was making a horrible scraping sound as I rolled it through the supermarket. Nevertheless, when I finished my shopping and saw a cartless woman, I offered it up, explaining, “It makes an awful noise, but it works.”

“That’s okay,” she said, taking it. “I have a husband at home like that.”

Both my fiancé and I are in our 40s. I thought it was both amusing and touching when he assumed the classic position to propose to me—down on one bended knee.

“Are you serious?” I asked, laughing.

“Of course I’m serious,” he said. “I’m on my bad knee.”