BUMPER CAR WEDDING: Leif and Heather Sawyer, who were married in August of 2008 went to the bumper cars after their wedding at the Alaska State Fair. (Photo courtesy of the family)

I solicited love stories from readers this week. My Facebook, Twitter page and email inbox filled with submissions . There were tales of picnic table proposals, awkward first dates, star-crossed personal ads and out-of-the-blue phone calls from long lost loves. Some stories were just a few sentences. Others were essay-length. They won't all fit in one column, but here are a few.

My favorite in the short-but-sweet category was a Facebook comment from reader Jeremy Maxie:

"My grandpa Al is 90 years old and still drives," he wrote. "My grandma lost a leg to diabetes, so he pushes her to the car, helps her in, then folds up the wheelchair (which is not light) and lifts it into the trunk. Amazes me every time."

From the world of Twitter, came a story of whirlwind love from readers Leif Sawyer, who goes by @AK_Hepcat and his wife Heather, who goes by @alaskanimp. The pair, who ran in the same theater circles years ago, connected online across the continent in 2008. (They have since, of course, blogged about their courtship from both their points of view.)

It began with a steady stream of Facebook wall posts. Then came conversations over Instant Messenger that stretched for hours.

alaskanimp: "The more we chatted, the more we discovered we have in common."

AK_Hepcat: "As we talked more and more, progressing from IM to phone, we found that we were spending hours talking, with it only seeming like minutes."

He happened to have a training in Orlando. She lived nearby. They met for dinner.

"After about two hours of talking once we'd gotten back to her place, we both realized there was no fighting whatever was bringing us together," he wrote.

"In the middle of a kiss, he said, 'Marry me,' " she wrote. "There was no other possible answer but 'Yes.' In fact, he proposed before he even said 'I love you.' "

"There really was no other option," he wrote.

She moved to Alaska in the summer. They were married in September at the Alaska State Fair. After exchanging vows, they went straight for the bumper cars.

A TENDER PROPOSAL: Caity and Joe Chapman at their wedding last November. (Photo courtesy of the family)

The next story came from Anchorage reader Shelley Chapman. Her message began with a copy of a note her daughter Caity sent out last spring about her engagement to boyfriend Joe Chandler. Caity had a terrible cold. She found the ring wrapped in the foil of a champagne bottle.

"He told me for every bad day, sick day, runny nose or whatnot he would be there and he would love me forever. He asked me to marry him and I cried and cried and cried and said yes," she wrote in the e-mail to her mother and friends.

The next message from Caity to her friends and family, sent a few months after the proposal, stopped me cold.

"Joe was in an industrial accident on May 28th which cost him his left arm," the message said. "It got caught in a conveyer belt and he could not pull his hand out in time. Shortly after his hand went in it started pulling the rest of his arm in brutally fracturing it and all he could do was grip to a metal pole next to him and hold on and fight for his life. The arm tore off at the shoulder and tore open his arm pit. It narrowly missed his neck, his head and his chest which were all injured as well. Joe said that all he could think of was that he didn't want to leave me."

Joe survived and was recovering, she wrote. They decided to move up their wedding date.

"Yes, my fiancé has no arm. Yes, our lives have been flipped upside down completely. But we still have each other and that's all I could hope for," she wrote.

The last thing in Chapman's e-mail was a picture of Caity and Joe's wedding last November. They are expecting a baby in August.

To balance out all the romance, my final story comes from a co-worker who urged me to broaden my love story scope. There are plenty of people who are making do, happily, without Valentines, she told me. To illustrate her point, she told me she had just been at a flower shop where she watched a woman purchase $200 worth of flowers. The shop clerk asked the woman what she wanted on the card.

"To me," the woman replied. "With love, from me."

Find many more reader love stories here