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Anna, at the feed store, made me laugh out loud last week.

“You’ll enjoy this, Pam,” she shared while ringing up my order of six bales of fescue and a Kit Kat bar. “My nephew, Grayson, who plays college baseball and who can inhale a rack of ribs before any of us lifts a fork, came home from school for our annual family get-together and announced to us all that he’s now a vegan!”

Cocking her head and savoring the best part, she added, “So, naturally, I asked, ‘Who is she?’ ”

After confirming that Grayson, indeed, had a new girlfriend and was researching to see whether Oreos were permissible within the parameters of his new dietary lifestyle, we both chuckled out of sympathy.

Oh, the things we do for love. Especially young love, when each new flame might very well be “the one.”

Mindful that my own horsey passion, dressage, can be as boring as watching the grass grow to most folks, I tried to be a good sport with a boyfriend, eons ago, who was a red-hot science-fiction fanatic.

Not only did I drive down to San Diego with him for a Star Trek convention (have you ever noticed how much Mr Spock’s eye makeup looks just like the heavily lined and frosted tints of pretty much every female in the 1960s?), but I also sat through the torturously boring and self-proclaimed epic, “Dune.” Even knowing that my then pop idol, Sting, had a cameo, shrieking his one line: “I WILL kill him!” did nothing to assuage my boredom.

But it’s not just young love, mind you. My best friend from childhood delighted in announcing the outlandish adventures that her Social Security-collecting mother was experiencing with a new boyfriend after the demise of her third marriage.

“She jumped out of a plane yesterday!” cried Donna over lunch. “And last week, she decided to go out deer hunting by herself to impress him, and when she didn’t show up by noon, we were worried sick and drove out to find her.”

“Was she OK?” I asked, spearing a forkful of salad.

“Oh, yeah. We found her, fast asleep, hanging from a harness and leaning out of a deer stand about 20 feet up a tree, rifle still crooked under her arm.”

“Now, that’s love,” I declared.

“That’s stupid,” Donna corrected. “She could have been killed.”

I wouldn’t call it stupid — dishonest, perhaps. We’re all relatively guilty of pretending we’re far more interested in a particular pursuit if we feel it will earn us brownie points with a potential new paramour.

However, if healthy relationships are to be built upon a foundation of honesty, perhaps it’s not a wise choice to make. Donna’s mother could have simply waved her hand and said, “Look, Walt, I’ve already been through three husbands, and it’s time I start doing what I want to do, which is going out to the theater and joining a book club, not jumping out of planes and certainly not fly fishing in Alaska. Those waders make my butt look huge.”

But then, who knows when one might ever have such an opportunity at love again, in late life?

In my case, being honest would have saved me two years of turbulence had I just stated flatly, upon arriving in San Diego, “I’m sorry, this is nuts. And take off that stupid tin foil hat. You look like a 6-foot Jiffy-Pop.”

So it didn’t work out, but we remained friends. In fact, I often hear people who are divorced say, “It’s funny, but now that we’re divorced, we get along great!”

You know why? Because when you’re simply friends, you’re comfortable being completely honest. You don’t hesitate to say to a friend, “You know I love you to death, but if you don’t stop talking about horses, I’m going to dive through that window.”

See? Honest.

Hey, wait a minute…