In honor of Saint Valentine, the patron of couples and epileptics and honey – I raise a toast to all the star-crossed lovers who faced the impossible and loved anyway. Here’s to you, Lysander and Hermia, Helena and Demetrius. A toast to you who dreamed a mid-summer’s dream of being together and were ready to pay the cost; to brave the wiles of despots in power and fairies in action and the asinine side effects of potion in motion. 

Let’s hear it for those in marriages of convenience or abject necessity that succeeded and loved anyway! Sixteen-year-old young women who people my family tree; women who married homesteaders and prospectors and widowers with children; ancestors who loved and conquered a new world and won the west. Let’s hear it for mail order brides who walked a plank ONTO a ship and into the unknown and bravely chased a new life.

Here’s a toast to all those couples of arranged marriages who learned to love anyway. Good job Mary and Joseph, Issac and Rebecca, and Bollywood actors – the world will never be the same. 

Now let’s pause a moment for those who loved and lost. For Romeo and Juliet who gave up too quickly. And especially let’s remember those who loved, really loved – no matter how short lived – no matter how soon the loss, no matter whether bereft through death, displacement or unfaithfulness.

Let’s hear it for enduring love, for couples who stay together or reunite despite the ravages of mental illness. For the wife who stays though there would be no shame in leaving; she loves the incurable alcoholic. For the husband who tenderly cares for the woman who no longer knows his name; yet he gently reminds her of the operas and symphonies and travels and grandchildren they have shared.  For those who stay steady in the face of battle scars and diabetic amputations; this one’s for you! 

And here’s a special bouquet to those singled out and shot down by Cupid again and again who keep getting up, smiling, and putting themselves out there to love one more time.

And now, one for the aunts – those women for whom the clock ticks. They have played the gambit of a queen; are ladies in birth, bearing, and education. They are full of wisdom and grace. All these single ladies know how to cook with love and fight for love. Even so, the knight on a white horse has not yet come riding by; nevertheless, they continue to love and spread that love lavishly in service to everyone they meet. 

Last, but not least, a toast to the real-life lovers, the love at first sighters, the life-long committers whose relationships have lasted not only a decade or two, but five and six decades – an entire lifetime – until they ceased to breathe. I know at least 10 of them and I hope you do too.

A toast! A toast! to couples and lovers wherever you are! What have you got that’s worth living for? Like as not, it is true love, just like Wesley and Buttercup.

Did you raise a cup for each of these lovers down through the ages? Are you now drunk on love? ‘Tis better mead than a grapevine has to offer.

A toast! To true love!