*Most relationships don’t last long on Star Trek, but they sure are fun while they last!*

Valentine’s Day is next week! Romantic meals will be consumed, boxes of chocolates and roses will be gifted, Barry White will be listened to and Star Trek will be watched. (Of course, for fans of the show that last one could be said at any time of the year.)

Romance has long been a part of the Trek universe. Whether it’s Kirk finding a girl in every spaceport or Data’s attempt to date a crewman or Worf and Jadzia Dax’s tragically-ended marriage, writers through the years have explored the way love makes us laugh, cry, cringe and sigh. How much do you know about love in the 23rd century and beyond? Let’s find out!

In season three of Star Trek: The Original Series, Doctor McCoy was diagnosed with a rare disease, xenopolycythemia. Since the illness is always fatal, I guess this is the last we’ll see of McCoy. Not long after, he joins an away team with Kirk and Spock to investigate an asteroid that turns out to be a camouflaged spaceship named the Yonada, hurtling toward an inhabited planet, with which it will collide.

On Yonada, McCoy meets Natira, High Priestess of the Fabrini. McCoy falls in love and, realizing that he doesn’t have much time left, he decides to marry Natira, and spend the rest of his life on the Fabrini ship. That’s all well and good, but in order to become a permanent member of Fabrini society, however briefly, he must agree to an invasive procedure.

What did Bones allow to be done so he could stay?

*Bones McCoy (Deforest Kelley) and High Priestess Natira (Katherine Woodville) in Star Trek: The Original Series’ “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”*

The Oracle of the People, a computer that controlled the Yonada and its people, insisted that every member of society had to be injected with something called the instrument of obedience. The device was implanted subdermally in the Fabrini’s temples and it monitored the Yonada inhabitants’ activities, making sure they didn’t do anything sacrilegious, in other words, anything that might lead to the realization that they were actually living on a spaceship.

In order to join Natira in wedded bliss, Bones had to agree to be injected with one of these devices, ensuring that he will never leave the Yonada. Once Kirk and Spock have beamed away, McCoy learns how to alter the asteroid ship’s course to avoid a collision. Unfortunately for him, this is one of the activities forbidden by the Oracle, and the instrument of obedience is activated, nearly killing McCoy, and giving him a worse headache than a Saurian brandy-fuelled bender. Spock figures out how to remove the instrument of obedience and it turns out that the Fabrini have the cure for Bones’ incurable disease, so, once the Yonada is back on course, he bids farewell to Natira.

Jean-Luc Picard has had several romantic entanglements over the years. Throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation, you could often cut the sexual tension between him and Beverly Crusher with a knife. The archaeologist Vash, while very different from Beverly, also held a strong attraction for him.

But perhaps nobody ever suited him quite as well as Lieutenant Commander Nella Daren. In the episode “Lessons,” she came aboard the Enterprise as the head of Stellar Cartography and it wasn’t long before she became the center of Captain Picard’s galaxy. One of the many things Nella and Jean-Luc had in common was their love of music. When Daren learns that Picard plays the Ressikan flute, she takes him to the fourth intersect of Jeffries Tube 25, rolls out her portable piano, and they play a duet.

But why in that Jeffries Tube, specifically, and what song did they play?

*Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Lieutenant Commander Daren (Wendy Hughes) kick it space style in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Lessons”*

According to Daren, that particular junction acted as a resonance chamber, making it the most acoustically ideal place on the ship. To prove it, she plays a selection from Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto. Picard then picks up his flute and plays an excerpt from Max Bruch’s “Scottish Fantasy.” The tune’s been around since 1880 but was rearranged by composer Jay Chattaway for the TNG episode “The Inner Light,” wherein Picard acquired his Ressikan flute, keeping it as a souvenir of his run-in with a mysterious and ancient probe.

Daren, enchanted by the tune, joins him on her piano and the resulting duet is one of the loveliest musical moments in Star Trek.

On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Benjamin Sisko’s relationship with Kassidy Yates became a big part of the story in later seasons, ending, as so many Trek relationships do, in heartache. The couple was introduced to each other by Ben’s son, Jake, who decided his father needed to start dating again. They took to each other like mice to cheese and eventually got engaged. Like Picard and Daren, they discovered early on that they had a particular passion in common.

What did both Yates and Sisko enjoy in their spare time?

*Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) and Kasidy Yates-Sisko (Penny Johnson Jerald) say goodbye in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s finale, “What You Leave Behind”*

Both Sisko and Yates were big baseball fans, which is puzzling since TNG had established many years earlier that baseball was an extinct sport. Three years after the episode “Evolution,” however, baseball was once more going strong, with Sisko displaying a baseball in his office on the space station. When he met Yates, she told him that her younger brother played for Cestus III’s Pike City Pioneers. In the DS9 episode “Take Me Out to the Holosuite,” Sisko and Yates became teammates on the Niners baseball team, playing against the Logicians, a Vulcan team with a penchant for on-the-nose team names.

Star Trek: Voyager'‘s Tom Paris was a flirt from the moment he came aboard the ship. The attention he paid to Kes awakened Neelix’s jealousy and his attempts to date the Delaney sisters became a running gag in the series. Ultimately, however, he would settle down and become a family man, unlikely as it seems, with the half-Klingon, half-Human B’Elanna Torres. They would get married in season seven of the show and have a child in the final episode of the series, as Voyager finally found her way home to the Alpha Quadrant.

Despite where their relationship wound up, they weren’t always a sure thing. B’Elanna didn’t take Tom’s flirting seriously for several years and he was fairly certain she didn’t feel “that way” about him. In the third season episode “Blood Fever",” however, B’Elanna’s passion got the better of her and, while she and Tom were on an away mission, she made every attempt to mate with him, uncharacteristic as it was.

What the heck got into B’Elanna all of a sudden?

*Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) and B’Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) were meant for each other*

As established in TOS’s “Amok Time,” Vulcans mate every seven years of their adult lives. The urge is called pon farr and it’s impossible to resist, forcing them to return to their home planet like salmon to their spawning ground. If they can’t mate at the appointed time, they die.

Ensign Vorik had a real problem in “Blood Fever.” He was in the throes of pon farr 30,000 light-years from home. His desperate need to mate led him to propose marriage to B’Elanna. She, of course, turned him down and he grabbed her in an attempt to convince her. In doing so, he inadvertently initiated a mind meld, establishing a telepathic mating bond with the engineer and sending her into pon farr, as well.

As tempted as he was to help her with her problem, Tom knew B’Elanna wasn’t herself and he resisted her attempts to mate with him. When it appeared she might die from the affliction, however, he had to give in or watch her die. Vorik found his way down to the planet, however, and initiated the koon-ut-kal-if-fee, a ritual fight to the death also established in “Amok Time.” He and B’Elanna fought until the blood fever had been driven from both of them and her desire for Tom subsided. For a while, anyway.

When the crew of Star Trek: Enterprise finally make it to Risa for their shore leave in “Two Days and Two Nights,” they have high expectations. Having drawn lots, several of our main characters get the chance to leave the ship. Some are looking for romance, others just a quiet break from the daily grind of exploring space. None of them get what they’re expecting, but only one of them experiences the perfect holiday.

Which one?

*The crew of Star Trek: Enterprise takes a shore leave on Risa in “Two Days and Two Nights”*

Malcolm Reed and Trip Tucker look forward to getting some action on Risa, seeking out new (female) life. Instead, they get conned by a couple of shapeshifting thieves, who take them for everything they’ve got except their underwear. Meanwhile, Mayweather plans to get some rock climbing in. The rock face, however, changes periodically, handholds and all, and the adventurous young ensign breaks his leg in a fall. All Archer wants to do is spend some time with his dog, Porthos, and a good book, but when the possibility for romance appears, he doesn’t turn it down. Until he finds out the woman he meets is actually a Tandaran spy, trying to get information about the Suliban from him.

Hoshi, who just wanted to practice her Risan and maybe learn a new language or two on her holiday, also didn’t get the vacation she expected, but she was the only crew member who went home happy when she met a man who swept her off her feet with his peculiarly complicated language. After a visit to a nearby steampool, they ended up spending the rest of the weekend in bed.

As the first openly gay couple in the Star Trek franchise, Paul Stamets and Hugh Culber were groundbreaking characters. Like any couple, they’ve been through their ups and downs. I mean, assuming any other couple breaks up after one of them is killed and then resurrected. That was one of their “down” moments. But despite that, they renewed their relationship and things have been going pretty well for them since, even voluntarily traveling to the distant future together, with Discovery and her crew.

We don’t know what the future holds for Stamets and Culber, but we know a little about their past. How did Paul and Hugh meet?

*Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) and Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp), Star Trek: Discovery’s groundbreaking couple*

Paul and Hugh met in a café on Alpha Centauri, where Hugh was humming Kasseelian Opera. Paul, who hates Kasseelian Opera, invited him to “stow it or sit somewhere else.” Thus began a romance for the ages.

In Star Trek: Discovery’s first season, when Stamets is about to risk his life to jump the ship to safety, he promises to take Culber to see Puccini’s La Bohème at a Kasseelian Opera House once they are safe. Things get messy and they are never able to attend the performance, but it is a very meta moment. Wilson Cruz and Anthony Rapp were both in the original Broadway cast of Rent, Jonathan Larson’s adaptation of La Bohème.