Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day made me feel sugar-sweet and bitter-blue after reviewing my heart’s history. The only cure for what ailed me was to pick the presidents that are my best valentines.

It’s come to this in the pandemic, a famine for femmes fatales. So little flirting, no backward glances on Zoom meetings. The only valentine I got was from my mother.

Let me explain. The long fast put my past in clearer images, men I’ve loved and lost — and those who lost me.

First, the Cambridge classics man. Ideal for an Anglophile. Except he was moody as the English weather and loved nothing more than a cup of tea, not even me.

We married and lived in London and San Francisco. Friends found us charming at parties. At home, not so much. If you’re not getting along in those cities, you’re not getting along. He’s one of the richest lawyers in London now, a real Jane Austen catch.

The author and I met after exchanging notes, feeling free as beguiled birds. Weeks went by, entre nous, in New Orleans’ French Quarter, a short walk to Cafe du Monde.

When he gave me a watch, I say, “I’ll think of you all the time.”

Flying to London, we reclaimed the Hampstead we each knew, like the Indian restaurant on High Street. We even went to Wisconsin to see my grandparents. Mostly, life floated and frolicked by the mighty Mississippi.

And it’s like an American Austen novel even now.

Later, hearing Bruce Springsteen in concert with my absolute favorite historian cut like a knife. There, in mid-song, he told me about Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. I say over the band, “Speaking strictly for me, we both could have died then and there.”

Yes, a lyric from her Dylan breakup song, “Diamonds and Rust.” The river froze for that moment.

They are pretty dead to me now, to tell you the truth. The movie date with a future secretary of state was great, no tears.

So, let’s look at the gallery of 45 men present like no other on Presidents Day. For my valentines, I know the trifecta I’d choose. (Hint: not Ike, though I like him.)

As a historian, I know them, warts and all, all too well: lots of generals, lawyers and enslavers. Fierce Andrew Jackson was all of the above.

You may think I’d welcome being wined and dined by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, where he’d serenade me with his violin. But I wouldn’t. He reminds me too much of the graceful Southern gentleman writer — with whom I journeyed to Monticello.

Give me the uproariously witty, brilliant lawyer from the prairie, the first president from outside the original 13 states. The president who recited “Macbeth” by heart, murdered in a theater in a Shakespearean tragedy.

The very one who won a war he tried to avoid and freed four million people. When I was a girl, we visited Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln’s corner house made a vivid imprint on me — even the bedroom. The crush started young.

I also adore jaunty Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He can show me his stamp collection and fix me a martini anytime. The perennial optimist in the darkest Depression. Like Lincoln, he won a war, then died. The wealthy Harvard man with a common touch.

My family recently visited Roosevelt’s Hyde Park, New York, house by the Hudson River, where the 39-year-old spent untold time recovering from polio and planting trees.

Set for the third presidential valentine? Bill Clinton. Peace and prosperity is hard to beat. So is Bill at his best. Disarming, he has a special sympathy for women, and I don’t mean to “ize.” Like Roosevelt, he married an extraordinary young woman who was considered plain.

In an Arkansas small town, the bright blue-eyed boy was raised by his mother, grandmother and “Pappaw,” his grandfather and Hope’s ice man. “Billy Clinton” grew up talking to all kinds of people, an amazing gift that swept him to the top.

Running dead last are Richard Nixon, Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump — each a “very good hater,” in Samuel Johnson’s words. They’re down in history’s dungeon.

Hearts to Lincoln, Roosevelt, Clinton.

Jamie Stiehm writes on politics and history. She may be reached at JamieStiehm.com.

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