We meet our future loves in the most casual ways. But those everyday meetings reveal strong similarities that lead to love — and to interesting stories on how that person became the one with whom we’ll celebrate Valentine’s Day. So many coincidences Eileen Arsenault demanded to see her future husband’s driver’s license the first time they met. “He was creeping me out, he was so agreeable,” she recalled. The two crossed paths at a party in Paul Arsenault’s honor, him coming, her leaving. When she mentioned she had moved to Naples from Massachusetts, Paul Arsenault told her he had too. When she told him she had lived in Rocky Neck, why, he had, too. Then she told him she had stayed at Parker’s Rooming House. Yes. He had, too. But the thunderbolt came when Eileen, talking about the coming month, told Paul her birthday was June 27. “Well, that’s my birthday,” he declared. “She’s kind of looking behind her for an exit,” recalled Paul, laughing. “So she says, ‘Can I see your license?’ She’s trying to card me because she wants to solve this right away.” “I thought, he’s such a nice guy; he doesn’t seem like a freak, but that’s just weird,” Eileen said. And then they went their separate ways, Paul to the farewell party for which he was two hours late, and Eileen — who had been at the party for two hours hoping to meet the creator of her favorite Naples painting — back to her apartment. She would not see him again until he returned to Naples early the next year and was recovering from an Arsenault escapade: helping to videotape a friend’s voyage over Alligator Lake in his pontoon-shod ultralight for a Gulfshore Life video feature. The friend, instead of gliding up and out on his second pass, stalled and hit both a palm tree and a roof, summoning what seemed like every emergency vehicle in Naples in 1983. He suffered, amazingly, only a bump on the head, but Paul decided to calm himself with a libation from a nearby coffee house/bar. It just so happened Eileen was there to hear music and see live people after her solitary workdays in a warehouse handling logistics for a vintage map company. Her husband-to-be had the intuition to know this was serendipity, so he asked her on a date. To a nonukes rally. The Arsenaults could write an entire novel about their courtship, which was interrupted by Paul’s goal to paint in the Hawaiian Islands, and their adventures together in all the countries in which he’s been commissioned to paint. But recently, they celebrated their long marriage with a different trip: They revisited Rocky Neck, Massachusetts, and stayed in the Parker rooming house — this time, together. Drama and laughter Jerri and David Hoffmann followed the template of many couples their age, meeting during high school, although they attended different schools in Washington, Missouri. And like many couples in the 1960s, they married young. “We got married during high school,” offered David Hoffmann, with a sly smile. But no. “We got married during college — ...