A Valentine's ode to TomKat

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A true-love Valentine's ode to TomKat

It's love when your Valentine goes on Oprah — Oprah, the unassailable bastion of car giveaways and fake memoirist slapdowns! — to announce your relationship. Not only that, but Tom can't even talk because he's so in love with you! So much love! Oh, look, he's springing on the couch, grappling with the hostess, pumping fists, giggling like a sometime seminarian from Syracuse. It's not one of his stylized widescreen freakouts; it's real! And it's even more love when he runs offscreen and grabs you out of the green room and makes you appear with him — on Oprah! — despite your repeated protests!

It's love when you have a whirlwind romance of less than two months, and then your twice-divorced, 42-year-old sweetheart, 16 years your senior, asks you to marry him on top of the Eiffel Tower, Paris' obvious symbol of phallic domination, during a promotional tour for "War of the Worlds.”

It's very, very much love when your very straight-laced lover man impregnates you early in your relationship, even though you've gone on record as wishing to keep your virginity until marriage. Even though your parents, Martin and Kathleen Holmes, raised you in a strict Catholic environment, and you attended the all-girls Notre Dame Academy in Toledo, Ohio, what the heck? It's love, baby!

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It's even more love when your honeybun buys you a sonogram machine to perform home ultrasound exams. Even when those scowling doctors from the American College of Radiology say that using it at home with Tom at the helm could bring “unnecessary physical risk to the fetus” if not “medically necessary.” If ol' Top Gun has spent time with expert e-Meter operators, why shouldn't he be conversant with all manner of devices? He could even do it hanging upside down from a ceiling, “Mission: Impossible”-style.

And then, Katie, what do you do to show you know it's love?

It's love when you trade up your longtime boyfriend, Chris Klein, for The Tom. It's okay — Chris won't mind. He knows your breakup had nothing to do with Cruise. (But he did say he won't be sending you a baby gift, or even a card. Oof!)

It's love-times-a-million when you adopt the beliefs of your Senior Scientologist boyfriend, then drop your longtime manager and agent. Then you get a new best friend, Jessica Rodriguez, a high-level Scientology practitioner and member of the church's influential Feshbach family. Her omniscient presence keeps those pesky journalists from asking pesky journalist-type questions.

That's love, all right. So, TomKat, here's to you on Valentine's Day, the most genuine celebrity love match we've ever seen!

J.-Y. Zhao comments on culture from the relative seclusion of Manhattan's East Village.

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