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In "The Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare declared that love was blind. To be honest, I didn’t see that one coming. But, I was young and idealistic when I endured his play. I wasn’t, however, ready for adult debates about the badness of passion. Now that I’m old and idealistic, I simply prefer to entertain the goodness of affection.

Anyway, how could love be blind? I recently read that it takes only five minutes to fall in love. The article claimed that five minutes of eye contact and some meaningful conversation could lead to an eruption of emotion. The heart rate increases. The feel-good chemicals in the brain start flowing. Then boom. A person can move from excitement to attraction to falling in love in three hundred seconds. Superficial or not, it feels right, doesn’t it?

At first I doubted the author, but a past experience made me wonder. When I was in the third grade, I sat beside a beautiful eighth grader on the bus. Just the two of us nested in that seat. She looked at me with deep blue eyes and sweetly asked, “Want a stick of gum?” Eye contact. Meaningful conversation. Wrigley’s. It felt right.

Falling in love was so easy! It happened in the classroom, on the playground, and even on the television screen. Annette Funicello could hold my gaze for more minutes than I dreamed possible, and when she smiled … when she smiled directly at me, I just felt goofy.

Eventually the cost of romance exceeded my financial capacity. There was no way my hay-baling and watermelon-picking money could sustain all my interests. Chocolates, valentines, and flowers required a bank account, not the change in a Mason jar. Multiple hugs-and-kisses relationships were out of the question.

Then I fell for a kindred spirit who was not susceptible to stopwatch infatuations. When I first saw her, she was perched on the parsonage porch and completely immune to our first five-minute encounter. For what seemed an eternity my charms were ignored.

Developing that relationship demanded a deeper understanding and connection. More time and energy were required. Glances and gifts were always acceptable but did not form the foundation for a future together.

Our Valentine’s Day this year may not start or end with Hallmark cards or roses, but memories and chocolates will be shared. As the Bard of Avon might have penned, love can be both a marathon and a sprint. With Cupid’s help we darted through the early years and now are blessed to have passed the half-century marker. That’s a lot of mileage and “will you be mines,” and we still have work to do.

What have I learned? Probably not enough, but I do know that I’m not ready to give up on those impulsive, fleeting moments of excitement that touched my soul when I sat on the school bus and unwrapped a piece of gum from an older woman.

I firmly believe that it’s healthy to fall in love three or four times a year. For most of us, it’s invaluable if we can continue to do it with the same person time and again. It just feels right.