Dr. Phil and Wife Robin McGraw Share Their Valentine's Day Plans: Eating Wedding Cake!

"He is so romantic," Robin McGraw tells PEOPLE of her husband, Dr. Phil

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Even after more than 40 years together, Dr. Phil McGraw and longtime love Robin McGraw still act like newlyweds.

While the doting spouses have many practical keys to marital success, they are both masterminds at celebrating romantic holidays, especially Valentine’s Day.

After many years of practice, the TV host knows how to surprise his wife in the most unexpected ways, like when he got creative and asked his 33-year-old son Jordan’s band Hundred Handed to perform a love song on The Dr. Phil Show in 2016.

“He is so romantic, when we were still in school, we had a little apartment and we were just as happy then as we are now,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. “He went out to the park out near our little complex and took a knife to a tree trunk and carved a heart and wrote, ‘PM heart RM,’ and took a picture of it and had it developed and framed it. I thought it was so sweet. It was the most precious gift ever.”

This year, Robin knows she can count on one unique treat from her husband.

“He always does the one thing he knows I really love and that is getting my favorite dessert for every occasion, wedding cake,” she says. “That is my go-to dessert and he knows I love it and always makes sure it is here for me.”

“Sometimes it’s small, but sometimes it is big! It is always different sizes,” she explains of their special tradition. “That’s what is fun about it, like what is he going to do this year?”

The dessert, typically reserved for a couple’s nuptials, has a sentimental significance for the McGraws.

When asked about her favorite Valentine’s Day memory, the mother of two is swift to say, “February 14, 1976, because he proposed on Valentine’s Day and we were married exactly six months later!”

The Dr. Phil show fans should recognize her for her unwavering support in the studio audience.

“Honestly we just started our 17th season and I still sit there every day, of every show,” the Life Strategies author says, before revealing why she and her husband always walk off set together.

After the first taping, she recalls a producer saying, “Can you please come to every show and walk off like that! When he took your hand it was my Sleepless in Seattle moment.”

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Despite all their epic grand gestures, the couple admit they are most happy cuddling on the couch together in sweatpants.

“We snuggle in the den on the sofa,” she adds. “We love to be at home and binge-watch TV, he has a recliner in the room. I put on my sweatpants and his socks.”

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When Robin met Dr. Phil, she says he “wasn’t really friendly that first evening.” Still, it was love at first sight.

“I knew he was the one and it was just a chemistry,” she says. “We just talked for hours and hours and he told me he was a pilot, he had gotten his pilot license at 16, and had his own small airport, and I told him, ‘To be honest with you I’ve never, ever flown on an airplane.’ I grew up really poor, so our first date was the next night and he took me up in his airplane.”

Before embarking on her first airplane trip, she had no hesitation.

“I felt so safe with him. He had this strong presence about him and this ability to make me feel safe and protected and everything was going to be ok,” she explains.

Both Dr. Phil and his wife have previously revealed that their fathers were both alcoholics, a pain that McGraw says drew the couple closer.

“I’ve never seen him take a drink,” she says. “When we first met, I asked him, ‘Do you drink alcohol?’ and he didn’t tell me then that his father was an alcoholic, but he said, ‘I actually think that I’m allergic to alcohol.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I think I love you.’ But it definitely defines who we are.”

“We both say that we grew up in a home, in a life of uncertainty,” she previously told PEOPLE. “Because when you have an alcoholic parent who goes on binges, you never know what life is going to be like that day. It changed who we were. And I made a decision when I was very young that I would not marry a man who drank alcohol, who was an alcoholic, and that when I got married and grew up, I would not raise my children in a home with an alcoholic.

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