For the past two Valentine’s, I’ve written “choose your own adventure stories.” They rocked, so check out the archives online: firstcallmagazine.com. This time, I’m not feeling that creative. So instead, I’m going to talk about hamsters.

Bear with me.

Hamster with me. Heh.

Hamsters rock, so I figure they can star in my Valentine’s article. And based on my family’s hamster history, I’ve concluded that you can learn a lot about trust  - that essential relationship ingredient - from these furry friends.

My family loves hamsters. My brother got one when he was seven, and he named him Hampshaw. Hampshaw could eat an entire matzah in under a minute (the big round kind, mind you) and keep the whole thing in his cheeks until he spit it out later into his cage to make matzah soup instead. Yum.

One day, Hampshaw escaped. He managed to find a hole in the wall of my brother’s room and scurry down to the apartment below ours. If I saw a random hamster in my room, I’d probably freak out and assume mouse-hood immediately. But these people must have had previous hamster experience, because they were shortly knocking on our door, Hampshaw in hand, telling us to be more careful next time. There’s lesson number one: trust people more than you think you should; sometimes strangers surprise  you.

Within a couple of years, Hampshaw died. He lived a good long life, and we had all grown quite attached to him. My brother was in camp at the time, and we knew that Hampshaw’s death would hit him pretty hard when he got home, so we went out and bought another hamster that we thought looked pretty similar. But the love between a boy and his rodent knows no bounds, and of course the second David got home, he instantly knew that this imposter was not his beloved. Lesson number two: never trust well-meaning family members who act all weird around you when you first get home from camp. (That one doesn’t fit into the relationship thing so much. But it’s good to know.) So we took him to visit Hampshaw’s grave at the 79^th Street entrance to Central Park, and from then on we learned to love the new man in town, Hampshaw Two. Until we realized Hampshaw Two was not a man at all when she gave birth to four babies. Lesson number three: the guy at the pet shop wants to sell you animals, not stare at their genitalia to confirm their sex. Trust only takes you so far; you have to meet it halfway for it to work at all. We checked ourselves the next time around.

By this time, I was old enough to want some hamsters of my own. So we went out and bought Mickie and Minnie. Minnie bit me so hard I bled, so she was gone pretty quick. Then we bought Brownie to replace her, but I think Mickie missed Minnie so he ran away to find her. So Brownie and I started to get pretty tight. He liked to play hard-to-get with me, which only made me want him more. I yearned for his affection, for the day he would stop trying to bite my thumb off, and for the moment when he would look in my eyes with his beady little black ones and say, “Shira, you’re the best owner a hamster could have.” But that never happened. Instead, Brownie ran away. I was distraught. I couldn’t believe he would betray me like that. For two weeks I was alone, staring at the wood shavings in Brownie’s cage, mulling over what I could have done wrong.

Then – a miracle. While reaching for my coat in the front closet, I heard some scuffling. I assumed it was a mouse, so I freaked out, but then a minute later, out comes my Brownie! He was dusty and skinny and probably very confused, but there he had been the whole time, living off the dustbunnies and the raindrops on our umbrellas. I scooped him up with joy, and he bit my finger so hard it made me cry. But I didn’t care; I knew this was the start of the renewal of our relationship, and I knew I could make him love me. It took a few more weeks, but in the end, Brownie did actually warm up to me. He regained his strength from the closet incident, and he became the hamster I always knew he could be.

Then he died. That was rough. But I got Daisy a couple of days later, so that made me feel better. Then she died. And another hamster never set foot in our home again.

Ready for the lesson? Think of Brownie as Trust itself. When you first get it, it’s kind of tentative. Then if you do something to lose it, it runs away in a closet somewhere and starves half to death. Then if you manage to find it again, it takes time to rebuild it and nurture it back to health. The death part doesn’t apply as much – hamsters just suck like that.

And that was lesson number four.