Love Rules

When Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, otherwise known as Bad Bunny, took the stage at the Super Bowl halftime show in Santa Clara, Calif., last weekend, I could feel the audience holding its breath. What would happen next? 

The week before his performance at one of the most-watched sporting events of the year, the Puerto Rican musician won three Grammy awards for album of the year, best música urbana album and best global music performance. He used his acceptance speech to call out the actions of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

“Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say: ICE out!” he said. “We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens, we’re humans and we are Americans.”

Predictably, Bad Bunny’s statement incited rage from American conservatives. Turning Point USA, the right-wing conservative educational advocacy non-profit and brainchild of the late Charlie Kirk, organized a MAGA-coded alternative halftime show at an undisclosed location featuring white country singers and a lip synch performance by Republican rap-rocker Kid Rock. To be blunt, it wasn’t great.

Back at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Bad Bunny performed his set almost entirely in Spanish, delivering an exquisitely moving, exuberant celebration of Latin joy. Bad Bunny strode through a meticulously rendered set that featured older men playing dominoes, young women doing their nails and a boy getting his hair cut, among other scenes that would remind many viewers of their families. Amidst the slice-of-life tableaus was a real-life wedding.

The wedding, complete with cake and a child actor falling asleep on a set of chairs pulled together on the side of the dance floor, enacted what the background billboard that closed the show proudly declared, complete with fireworks: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

Here at the Tyee and especially today, we’re keen to celebrate love in all forms. Find six real-life stories of love lost and found by our readers and staff. Share yours in the comments.

— Jackie Wong, senior editor

Celebrating hope, resilience and belonging

My partner and I will be celebrating three milestones this February: 13 years of knowing each other, three years of marriage and my partner becoming a Canadian citizen.

We met in India in 2013, just as we were graduating from college. We fell in love in a country where our relationship was not only invisible, but criminalized at the time. Same-gender marriage was and still is not legally recognized. Loving each other required courage, patience and an endless supply of hope.

After five years together, we knew we wanted to commit to each other for life. But we also knew we couldn’t do that safely or legally at home. So we came to Canada as international students, carrying two suitcases and a very big dream: to live somewhere our love could exist in the open.

Canada felt different right away. We saw Pride celebrated loudly and with love, not whispered about. We saw queer families living ordinary, beautiful lives. For the first time, the future felt possible.

As we built our life here by studying, working and starting over, we also began sharing our journey online. We wanted other queer South Asians to see that a happy, ordinary life is possible, and that you don’t have to choose between your family and your queerness.

Leaving our home country was one of the hardest decisions we’ve ever made, but it also made us stronger. It connected us to a global South Asian queer community, helped us grow in our careers, pushed us out of our comfort zones and encouraged us to grow academically in ways we never imagined.

After years of building from scratch, we got married and bought a home in Toronto. In 2025, we brought our mothers to visit. We travelled across the country together, watching them experience a place that had embraced their daughters fully. They were happy in a way that felt new and deeply healing.

This Valentine’s Day, we’re celebrating hope, resilience and belonging. A country that gave our love room to breathe. And the quiet miracle of choosing each other again and again in a place that finally chose us too.

— Shubhalaxmi Patil, audience development analyst

To love is to lose

To have love is to one day lose it. This we know, painfully so. But like a corvid's nest, little, long-forgotten scraps can hold you together. A peanut-butter crunch Clif Bar, squished up in the months since she tossed it at you, can save you after biking up a needlessly steep hill, like a man possessed. An imperfect picture deep in your phone archives, you are blurry and blinking and she's giving you rabbit ears, can remind you to smile. A note with her favourite Subway order can be a lifeline when you miss her. Hoarding, nesting, remembering, loving, I’m still unsure.

— Olamide Olaniyan, associate editor

Remembering Miles

My dear dog Miles died in January 2022 from bone cancer. He was 11: a Husky-border collie cross who was always smaller than he seemed. My grey friend came into my life as a puppy, saw through the end of my first marriage, kept me alive through the grief of that loss, and lived on to see me marry the woman whom he took to as one of the favourite people in his life.

Miles was shy, but curious and my constant companion, whatever we did. I sometimes felt as if we shared some psychic bond. My mother tells me that if I had fallen asleep on the chesterfield, and Miles wanted to join me there under the covers, he would seem to will me to lift up the covers in my sleep so he could climb up and be close.

He slept almost all the days of his life with me, and it was a rare morning when he woke that he didn’t stand on my chest, looking with joy into my face, wagging his tail, as if he were saying, “It wasn't a dream! You are here!”

I think pets enter our lives when they’re supposed to. This dog came into mine as a wonder: a dog of a lifetime; a magic dog. I miss Miles every day. I also think pets teach us so much about love: about how generous and unconditional it can be, and how generous and unconditional it should be.

Thank you, my Miles. I miss you, darling boy. Happy Valentine's to my grey friend.

— Tyee reader Sean Henry, Victoria, B.C.

A love poem for Mother Earth

The roof is first to know,
the first to feel
As you drop, drip and drab.
Wet you work
Then fall, clearing dust,
smothering Sun and misting air with cedar salt
Boughs of deepened green dip, shallow wind whistles
Flutters of a flag, drawn down, limp and sticky to its pole

Next to the forest fringe
High above Bonniebrook that is not bonny today
Wave flicks of salted water find rocks, slimed with green flotsam
Rocks roll, gravelling under oceans weight, shh, child, hear the pebbles talk
Nor’east February wind, pursed lips blowing no kisses
Clouds oh Grey
oh Mother Love

— Tyee reader Julie De Ath, Gibsons, B.C.

On Valentine’s morning, our kitchen transformed

My mom would transform our kitchen table every Valentine’s Day morning.

We’d eat dinner together every night but weekday breakfasts were usually a feral, fend-for yourself-meal where my siblings and I would squabble over peanut butter toast or the dregs of cereal as my single working parent whisked out the door.

But on the morning of Feb. 14, we’d wake up to a table adorned with a bouquet of local foliage, beautiful quilted heart-themed placemats made by my Nana and a handful of chocolates and jellybeans laid out for each of us. Sometimes there’d even be a small gift, like a coveted pen that would write in different colours or brand new pencil crayons.

My mom would place stacks of pancakes and mandarins in front of us and even let us drench them in syrup — a rare deviance in her general stance against sugar.

Valentine’s Day cards always came in second fiddle to the thrill I’d get from walking downstairs and sliding open the kitchen door to see a space transformed. A small pile of candy wrapped in red and purple foil just for me. And the smell of pancakes.

— Michelle Gamage, health reporter

Cold day for romance

When I think of the most romantic periods in my life, I think of cold. Snowbanks, icy roads, a giant coat and winter boots, and deep black sky spackled with distant stars.

As a high school girl in the ‘80s, the Christmas break was when all the cool boys would come back from university, and the frozen pool of romantic prospects would thaw for a few weeks. This period was an intensive round-about of parties, dalliances and heated romantic liaisons of the impassioned teen variety. It wasn’t without its dangers.

Witness: the time my sister crashed her car into a snowbank with a boy named Billy Boychuk (insert filthier version here). Instead of doing the more rational thing like going for help, they stayed stuck and made out for hours. She tried to hide the deep purple hickeys on her neck by wearing a big cowl neck sweater, but it didn’t work. My parents were furious, and she was grounded. Goodbye to Billy Boychuk!

When I think of snowy nights, I still feel a romantic surge, a blizzard of yearning.

One of the most romantic nights of my life took place in the middle of a snowstorm. On Feb. 14, 1996, when Vancouver had only just managed to dig itself out of record-breaking dump of snow, another storm hit the city. I was a student at Emily Carr University of Art + Design at the time, so poor that I couldn’t even afford the bus and had to walk an hour to school every day.

That night, walking home from the campus, the city was eerily still. It was strangely magical, with few cars and only a smattering of folks out on the street. I was deep in the most intense crush of my life. I thought for a moment that maybe we would bump into each other, out there in the darkness.

Many years later, after marriage and a kid, we still talk about that night. Lo and behold, he too was out there wandering about. A snow-crossed romance if ever there was one.

— Dorothy Woodend, culture editor