He gave me a paddlebal for my nineteenth birthday. I could tell, though, that it was no ordinary paddleball. It was a super deluxe model, made not of flimsy, unfinished pine but of polished dark cherry.

Two months later for his birthday, I sent him a book.

For Christmas, I bought him more books. And a tie. From the Gap.

Then he gave me books. A CD. A stuffed animal--a pregnant red lobster. And condoms.

From our gifts, you'd think we're not a very romantic couple.

We're not.

But I do love romance. I adore romantic movies, novels and plays. Whenever I watch or read a particularly cheesy, soul-wrenching, mushy scene, my heart tightens, I lose my breath, and my eyes begin to water. It's exhilarating.

And it doesn't take much to make me melt, either. Any vaguely romantic scene will do.

A simple moment on the air or in print framing a tense or breathless or just plain corny "I love you," will cause me to sigh and exhale gallons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Take, for example, one of the last episodes of that amazing TV show, "China Beach," which I watched religiously in high school at the expense of differential equations and James Joyce. In the most moving scene of 1990, Dodger, the strong, silent marine with a romantic soul, tells nurse Colleen not to visit him in the States after the war.

"Why?" the bewildered Colleen asks.

"Because I love you," he confesses in constipated tones.

About to implode with emotion, he looks away and climbs into the helicopter that is waiting to take him home.

It doesn't seem so affecting on paper, but I didn't recover for days.

My friends dismissed my flaky, mad ravings about this or that romantic TV moment as those of a fellow repressed adolescent who had attended an all-girls private school far too long.