Most Valentine’s Days include eating my weight in chocolate and wandering the halls, mournfully serenading love songs to dreamy, star-eyed couples, most of which fail to acknowledge my presence.

To all those lonely souls out there, I suggest that this year, instead of worrying about the lack of valograms in life, we embrace the moral of Love Actually and take comfort in the fact that we are all a part of someone else’s love story. Our lives make up the bodies of our parents’ romances; here are just a few beginnings.

My parents unknowingly grew up thirty-five miles away from each other in Iowa. They both came out to Seattle for grad school and finally met, halfway across the country, at the UW.
–Paige Paulsen

My mom ended a relationship and her friends took her to a bar to lift her spirits. They began pushing her to talk to every guy they saw, and to make them stop she said, “I will talk to the next guy that walks in.” The next guy to walk in was my dad.
 – Megan Williams

Once, my mom got her palm read.and it said that she would meet an important person at the top of a hill with a statue of Christ. Years later, my mom traveled to Brazil. My dad was her tour guide and they met at the top of Corcovado, a mountain in Rio with a famous statue of Christ. After they met, they traded off visiting each other while keeping in contact by writing letters. Almost two years after they had met, they got married. It’s now the 26th anniversary of the week they met.
–Julian Novais

One afternoon, this friend of my dad’s comes home from class and tells my dad: “Hey Dave, there’s this girl in my section I think you should meet. She’s blonde, she’s pretty, she went to Princeton and she’s really smart. Plus, she’s got that certain bitchy quality you love.”
 – CJ Graham

My mom needed a place to stay in Boston, so my uncle suggested a friend. She knocked on his door, and said, “Hey, can I crash here?” and then she never left.
–Maya Troll