WHEN I was at school, the end of the year was reserved, among other things, for the filling of autograph books. These were little diary-sized note books that were very popular among girls in the 1970s and 80s.

In these books, someone was bound to sign off with the alphabets that made up the name of a country. F.R.A.N.C.E. for instance, meant “Friendship Remains And Never Can End” while the letters in the word I.T.A.L.Y. stood for “I Trust And Love You”.

This may sound corny to you, but we were teens then and wet behind the ears! We also didn’t know many boys so it was the love and friendship we had for each other that spilled from our hearts and poured forth onto these pages.

Today, there’s Facebook and Twitter for you to do the same. As for symbols, there are a myriad of them now which convey a wealth of meaning and expression. When my daughters send me text messages or when my students write on my FB wall, that’s when I see the diversity of these symbols [“<3” is a symbol for heart, : ) for happiness, ;-) is a wink and : ( for sad]. Truncated English words also abound, with BTW (by the way), LOL (laugh out loud), BRB (be right back) and TTYL (talk to you later) being examples.

In earlier days, cards were the way to go. When Valentine’s Day came around, most girls would buy or make their own and these were filled with words or poems of love. Some were downright soppy (“sentimental in a silly way”, as defined by the Oxford dictionary) but some, I must admit, were beautifully written and conveyed just the right amount of feeling and emotional sophistication.

I still remember a Form 5 classmate who fell in love with this handsome Chemistry teacher. While many other girls were equally crazy over him, she was the only one who dared to send him a huge card on Valentine’s Day. In it, she expressed the fervent hope that he would seriously consider waiting for her and marrying her after she had finished her Form 6! “Please be mine and mine alone!” she wrote urgently in red. (BTW, the red symbolised her blood.) He got married that very December but not to her!

Thinking of those heady days fills me with nostalgia to remember the feverish words of hope, passion and love that Valentine’s Day brought out in young girls.

For me, it was only when I went to university that I met boys who proved to me that they could get love-struck too. One of my good male friends found love in his first year. The girl and he were poles apart. Although they were both Chinese, he was English-educated – spoke, wrote, dreamt and loved in English – and she did it all in Mandarin. Yet, he was so smitten by her sweet demeanor that no wise words of advice had any effect on him.

For Valentine’s Day that year, he showed me the famous sonnet by William Shakespeare that he had chosen to copy in the card he had made for her.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love,

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

Oh, no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests ... and is never shaken.”

I read these lines and started to “shake”, but with laugher. “Please,” I begged of him, “do not send this to her.”

I told him simply and sincerely, “She’s not going to understand a word of it. Buy her a nice bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates and with what little money you have left over, take her out for some Hokkien fried mee. She’d appreciate it more!”

He sent her the card anyway. I don’t know how she took it but I do know this: the relationship didn’t last.

A couple of months later, he got over his broken heart and “fell in love” with a different girl. In the years that followed, I lost count of the number of girls who successfully managed to occupy his heart.

He used to tell me his tales of woe and happiness – what this girl said, what that girl wanted, how crushed he was by this one and how crazy he was about another.

There was a time he even professed he was beginning to feel that he would die an old bachelor. When he asked me why his relationships kept failing, I told him to bring me the Shakespearan sonnet he had liked so much in his first year.

“Read,” I told him, “what the last few lines say.”

Love alters not with his brief hours and

weeks,

But bears it out ... even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

“You,” I told him, “are a man who has yet to meet a woman whom you truly love. Until you do so, I don’t think you can appreciate the real power of love or the lengths a man will go for it. You have not found such love yet. When you do, only then will you realise how powerful its hold is and how unwavering you will be in your commitment.”

He knew what I meant. And, I knew what I meant because, unlike my friend, I had met the love of my life. He has been in my life for 30 years now and I have been married to him for a good 26 of those years!

It was Mignon McLaughlin who said, “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.” I couldn’t agree more.

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