There are no shortage of magazine stories about romantic love. Avenue and Edify both feature weddings with some of the sweetest love stories you’ll ever read (avenuecalgary.com/avenue-calgary-weddings and edifyedmonton.com/style/weddings). We love these stories! We thought we’d also highlight something a bit different this Valentine’s Day, with five stories about love in all its many forms.

“Love/Life” is a short story by Amber Burke on the Funicular magazine website: “We are more of this earth than we were, etched by its waters, its gravity, its sun, its time. You pick me up; my hair drapes over your arm into the air. When did your hair go gray? We are thinner, skins so thin.”

With “Roses Are Red, Revenge Makes Me Blue, Can I Hold a Grudge, And Still Love You?,” in UCalgary’s arch magazine, “Dr. Susan Boon, PhD, illuminates the bright sides of romantic dark sides — and reminds us that even our most meaningful relationships are messy.”

Artist Sam Schembri writes about her work “This, My Body” in SNAPLine magazine’s Queer Issue: “Here I am, looking at my reflection, creating a reflection, and reflecting in the reflection. Thinking about self-love, gender dysphoria, vanity, and Queer shame in relation to this myth [of Narcissus].”

For FreeFall magazine, Sharon Berg interviews authors Anne Sorbie and Heidi Grogan in “The (Un)expected Passion in Stories of (M)othering”: “Pure and simply, every piece in (M)othering is about, or connected thematically in some way, to the idea of love. And love is perpetually featured in all languages.”

In “Out of the Blue” Western Horse Review shares a touching story about “how a horse with a bleak future transformed into one of the sweetest Valentine stories of all time.”

You’ll find love in unexpected places throughout the pages of your favourite Alberta magazine. Spend your Valentine’s Day doing what you love best – reading!