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The proposed marriage of American Airlines and US Airways announced Thursday may be the last in a series of industry mega-mergers, but history suggests combining two big carriers isn't easy.

"The history of airline mergers in the U.S. is good, bad and ugly," says Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at the consulting firm Hudson Crossing. He and many others point to the 2008 union of Delta and Northwest as the best merger in recent memory.

"Delta and Northwest had already been cooperating on a number of different issues," Harteveldt says. "They were members of the same airline alliance, they cooperated on certain international flying; they had a complementary route network; they had similar cultures; they had a similar approach to doing business."

Dealing With Pilot Seniority

Delta hired a former head of Northwest to lead the combined airline. And Daniel Kasper, a consultant at Compass Lexecon says, Delta did something else that was very smart. Pilots from both airlines wanted a deal and Delta told them it wouldn't happen unless they could agree in advance on how they would merge their seniority lists.

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Zadie Smith first met Nick Laird when she submitted a short story to a collection he was editing. They were both undergraduates at the University of Cambridge. Her story, Laird told The Telegraph in an interview in July 2005, "...was just head-and-shoulders above anything else." Smith's career took off after that. Her first novel, White Teeth, was an international bestseller and won critical acclaim. Later, Laird said that going to literary parties with Smith made him feel "two feet tall." Even so, the two writers support each other – showing each other their unpublished work and exchanging advice.

Smith has also publicly described their relationship. In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, she explains that she and Laird work in the same library in New York — on different floors. At the end of the day, they tell each other about the people they have seen out and about, and re-enact the conversations they have overheard (at one point she says she couldn't wait to tell her husband about a cat-eyed teenager in a Pocahontas wig she saw "sashaying" down Broadway). "The advice one finds in ladies' magazines is usually to be feared," she writes. "But there is something in that old chestnut: 'shared interests.'"

For Valentine's Day, Morning Edition commentator Sandip Roy shares a family love story from 70 years ago.

I always knew that my mother's aunt Debika was the most beautiful of all the great-aunts. I didn't know that when she was young, she jumped off a moving train for love.

She is now 90. Bent with age, she shuffles with a walker. But she's still radiant, her hair perfectly dyed.

It sounds like a typical Bollywood story. Boy meets girl in pre-independence India. They fall in love. Her family says no way. The boy came from the same clan. That was regarded almost as marriage between siblings. And there were far more suitable boys for such a beauty, like the son of a top-ranking civil servant. Debika says her uncle and brother kept two guns handy to shoot over-eager Romeos on sight.

So one night in 1941, she decided to escape. She packed a bundle with everything she needed: a couple of blouses, a petticoat and two albums — one with family photos, the other with postcards of Hollywood movie stars like Norma Shearer and Claudette Colbert.

She put a roll of false hair on the pillow so it looked like she was sleeping. There were dozens of servants to be evaded, big dogs patrolling the yard and many locked doors. She retraces her steps for me more than 70 years later.

She left barefoot, in the kind of sari housemaids wore, to look like a young woman going to work in the breaking dawn. Her fiance was waiting to take her to the train station, but she panicked when she realized the taxi driver recognized her. She was afraid her powerful uncle would show up at the next station with guns. So the runaways decided to jump off before the station. Guards came running, but they nonchalantly strolled away as if they jumped off trains every day.

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