Trends : LOVE STORIES: : THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY : ‘Sand and the Sea’

From true love to stabbed-in-the-back love, from quick love to love that just won’t die, View writers have chronicled looks at love in the ‘80s for Valentine’s Day eve. Some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent, and the guilty, but all are true . . . even if love sometimes isn’t.

Tom Drucker and Marcia Seligson-Drucker decided to celebrate their second wedding anniversary with a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii, including a surprise planned by Tom. All Marcia, an author and journalist, knew was to bring her bathing suit. Tom, a management consultant, brought a portable stereo.

A stretch limo appeared at their hotel. Inside was a lavish picnic basket, packed with fine champagne and other delicacies. The limo took the Los Angeles couple to a helicopter which flew them to a secluded beach, accessible only by helicopter or by water. The pilot told them he’d return in five hours.

Tom’s private Adam-and-Eve, back-to-nature party was going precisely as planned. The two stripped off their clothes and went for a swim. They were lying on the beach together, “doing ‘From Here to Eternity,’ ” as Tom described it, when suddenly they were met by a band of interlopers: about 15 “wild” goats were advancing toward them.

“Marcia, being from New York, totally freaked out,” Tom recalled. She started shrieking, ran into the water and begged her husband to surrender the picnic basket. She yelled at him to get in the ocean before he was killed. “My entire urban paranoid personality came out,” Marcia said.

Tom calmly assured his wife the animals were “probably spirit guides who’d come to wish our marriage well.”

“Of course, the animals turned out to be completely benign,” said Marcia. “It was very strange. They just seemed to be interested in watching us and then they left.”

This year, to celebrate their fifth anniversary, Tom and Marcia are planning a trip to the Arizona desert.