Valentine's Day messages: 18 for wherever you two are right now

It's February 13th, a little after nine, and you're in the card aisle at the drugstore with everyone else who meant to do this last week. You found one that isn't too cheesy. The front says Happy Valentine's Day in gold script. The inside is blank, and blank is the problem.

Here are 18 Valentine's Day messages, sorted by where your relationship is right now: just starting, years in, married, long distance, funny, and short enough for a caption. Copy them, but swap the sample detail for one only the two of you would get. That swap is the whole difference between a card and a form letter.

The message came long before the card. In February 1477, in Norfolk, England, Margery Brews dictated a letter to her fiancé, John Paston, and called him my right well-beloved Valentine. She's credited with the first known Valentine love letters, and the Paston Footprints history project calls it the earliest written use in English of Valentine for someone you love. It wasn't a poem about love in general. The engagement was stuck on the size of her dowry, and her letter suggests she'd marry him even if he had only half his land. They were married about two months later.

The store-bought valentine has an American birthday. According to the Massachusetts history site Mass Moments, the first American-made valentines went on sale in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1849. Esther Howland made them. After Mount Holyoke, one of her father's business associates sent her an elaborate English valentine, and she started making her own. She hoped for $200 in orders; her brother came back from a sales trip with $5,000 worth. Mount Holyoke College says the business went on to gross $100,000 a year.

The card stuck, and so did the habit of signing it with a name and nothing else. Margery Brews didn't, and yours doesn't have to either. For how other countries mark the day, see Valentine's Day around the world.

Generic: Happy Valentine's Day to the love of my life. You mean the world to me.

True, sweet, and it could be signed by anyone to anyone.

Yours: Happy Valentine's Day to the person who still saves me the corner piece of the lasagna. You mean the world to me.

Same feeling, plus one detail. Now it can only be from you.

Keep it light. The charm of a first Valentine's is admitting how much you're still figuring out.

• Six dates in and I already have a ranked list of your laughs. Hoping tonight adds a new number one. Happy Valentine's Day.
• I don't know your middle name yet, or what you were like in high school. I'd like the chance to find out both. Happy Valentine's Day.
• Fair warning: I've started telling people about you. Happy first Valentine's.

If this is your first one together, there are gift ideas in your first Valentine's Day together.

A few years in, the message doesn't have to prove anything. It works best when it tells the story so far.

• Ten years ago you were the person at the party who wouldn't stop talking about sourdough. You still won't. I still think it's cute. Happy Valentine's Day.
• Two leases, one flat-pack dresser and a road trip with no AC. Happy Valentine's Day to my favorite teammate.
• You know which song I'll skip and which one I'll pretend not to like. Nobody's known me that well, and I've never minded less.

Marriage comes with bills, carpools and laundry that folds itself only in theory. Valentine's Day is a reminder that it started with dating.

• Happy Valentine's Day to the man who still scrapes the ice off my windshield before I leave. I noticed. I always notice.
• I married you for the way you dance at weddings. I'm staying for the way you handle a Tuesday.
• The kids are at your mom's, the dishes can wait and I made a reservation. Consider this your formal invitation, wife.

Long distance doesn't need a sad card. It needs something that shrinks the miles for one night. More on that in the hardest part of a long-distance relationship.

• I put your hoodie on the chair across from me at dinner. Terrible conversationalist. Come home soon. Happy Valentine's Day.
• Same moon, different window. I checked. Happy Valentine's Day.
• I booked the flight. Now every bad day is just one day closer to the arrivals gate. Happy Valentine's Day.

For couples who flirt by roasting each other. Works best when the joke is true.

• I love you more than free samples. And you've seen me with free samples.
• Happy Valentine's Day to the person who reads every text I send and still replies "k." I'm working on you.
• You're the only person I'd let pick the music on a road trip. That's love, and it's also a risk.

One line for the photo, the story or the note on the bathroom mirror.

• My favorite plus-one.
• The best thing I ever said yes to.
• You, me and the good lighting.

A text at midnight gets read fast and buried by morning. A card ends up in a nightstand drawer, sometimes for years. A caption shares the spotlight with the photo. Pick based on what you want to happen next: a reply right away, something kept, or something everyone sees.

If your message keeps growing into a letter, the guide is what to write in a love letter. And if you're still missing the gift itself, see last-minute Valentine's Day gifts.

Some messages want the year's photos next to them. That's what Eternal Gift is for: you build a page online with your photos, the message or a longer letter, your song from YouTube and stickers, and send it by link or a QR code you can print and tuck inside the card.