CAMBRIDGE — Lesley Love knows a thing or two about romance.

The local immigration lawyer is on maternity leave, after all.

So the mother of two — Benjamin is eight and Brynn is 10 months — was a little perplexed to find out that Waterloo ranked No. 3 in Amazon.ca's annual ranking of the 20 Most Romantic Cities in Canada. Waterloo? Really?

"I don't know why they would pick Waterloo over the others," said the Kitchener-raised Cambridge resident on Wednesday.

"I think Cambridge is a pretty neat little spot with restaurants and things like that, and Langdon Hall. It's always romantic there. Not that my husband has ever taken me there."

Aye, there's the rub. Her lawyer hubby John isn't a very romantic fella, she says. Passionate prose and soft-spoken sonnets don't emanate nearly as often as linguistic legalese from their Queen Street office.

So maybe that's why Waterloo came behind only Victoria and North Vancouver at the top of the list. Guelph, where Love went to university, was eighth. Kitchener is 19th. Cambridge, which was 20th a year ago, fell off the Love Boat deck completely.

Of course, the survey was based not on the tender sighs and misty moonbeams, but cold sales figures and music download ratios calculated on a per-capita basis.

There is no grey, certainly not 50 shades worth, in these crisp numbers.

More sparkling jewelry sold. More bodice-ripper novels and relationship books read. More "The Fault in Our Stars" and that "Endless Love" remake put on debit. More Michael Bublé and Barry White croon tunes were purchased in Waterloo — which ranked second overall in the sexual wellness and romantic comedy categories.

Are your legs turning to mush just thinking about it? Love's aren't.

In her court of affections, she judges naked consumerism to be no measure of a true heart.

"To me, that would then show that perhaps people don't have enough romance if they have to buy all that stuff," she quipped, noting she and her husband prefer classical music.

"So maybe that means we're very romantic and I'm not giving John enough credit."

And maybe Kitchener and Cambridge just don't have enough lovelorn undergrads to compete with two-university Waterloo on Amazon's tilted-towards-youth playing field of romance.

"Clearly it tells me that we need to make more efforts to increase our student population in Kitchener," said Berry Vrbanovic, Kitchener's once-married-but-now-single mayor.

"I'm convinced that the numbers are skewed for Waterloo because of that."

Fittingly, Waterloo's ascent in the romantic rankings comes after Dave Jaworsky won office last fall and proclaimed himself the "huggable" mayor. Coincidence?

"Even with our 25th anniversary just days before the election, my wife and I found time for ourselves at a great Uptown restaurant," Jaworsky said in an email on Wednesday.

The new mayor is known to like his Dean Martin. Sometimes the moon might even hit his eye like a big pizza pie. That's amore. And the survey says there's more amore in his town.

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However, if there's a heartfelt connection between the municipal and the romantically fanciful, Love doesn't see it in this region.

Not in Waterloo. Not in Kitchener. Not in Cambridge or even Canada.

"If John were to say to me, 'Where would you want to go that's romantic?' I would say, 'Take me away!' I want an airplane and a passport."