Last year I spent Valentine's Day working in a Starbucks trying to help every couple that approached my register decide which one of them was going to pay for the other's Mocha Frappuccino, an experience which has heightened my resolve that I can never sleep with anyone that drinks blended coffee beverages or that uses the word “venti.” This sort of distinction immediately discounts at least half of your demographic in any major city.

This year I'm thinking ahead. I'm reading a book of theory on love. I'm recommending it to anyone with what can be generally construed by his or her friends as having a “bad attitude,” is accused of being “too picky” or has heard that “everyone wants to sleep with you; you're just to goddamn aloof, stuffed up in some coffee shop reading theory to notice.” Laura Kipnis' Against Love: A Polemic deconstructs a contemporary notion of love and relationships, tracing our sensibilities about modern coupledom to the rise of the novel as a medium in the eighteenth century (a.k.a. fiction). She locates our notions of “working at a relationship” to a culture so invested in pop-psychology and self-improvement that we fail to recognize that we are a nation of workaholics, bringing our work ethics to our sexual encounters. It's an essay that presents the argument that we've all secretly suspected to be true but haven't had the balls to come out and say it, namely: if you're not having sex on a regular basis with one person, maybe it's because you think too much. Kipnis argues, “Too much rationality or thinking risks killing the romance – and of course risks defying prevailing conceptions of the normal human: reptilian analogies like “cold-blooded” tend to be deployed against anyone displaying too much cognition where moodiness should prevail … clearly the only thing to do is to think as little as possible and hope for the best.” You can really get off on thinking about what a great thinker you are this Valentine's Day.

It's like in Annie Hall when Woody Allen stops the happy couple on the street and asks them about their relationship:

Woody Allen: Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?

Female street stranger: Yeah.

Woody Allen: Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?

Female street stranger: Uh, I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.

Male street stranger: And I'm exactly the same way.

Woody Allen: I see! Wow! That's very interesting. So you've managed to work out something?

Clearly there is a long tradition of neuroses on the topic. You're not the only one with issues.

So you think too much. Everything makes perfect sense now. Of course now you understand why you were trying to make eye contact with all those squirrels. You are a saint, a fucking intellectual; you are a contemporary St. Francis of Assisi . You might as well start writing your confessions and wait to be canonized. Who needs sex? You and the squirrels can go live in a cave somewhere removed from human contact and the human condition.

Or if you aren't ready to resign yourself to an existence of communing with the local wildlife this year, you have fourteen days to make yourself lovable. These things take work. Just don't tell the boys you meet that you read theory on sex. Boys hate this. Or worse, they read theory too, and then you're both doomed from the start. All the signifiers of the season are going to haunt you either way, so someone may as well fall in love with you. If the 9-to-5 hasn't worn you down yet this winter, then, darling, pull your self up by your steel-toe boot strap , powder your nose and hit the street. You just found yourself a part-time job. There must be a whole city full of boys out there who would like to work with you. In a few weeks, when the boy breaks it off because you are too high-maintenance or too low-maintenance or because the two of you don't know how to accessorize to a compatible degree, try not to think too hard about which one it is. If you make it through the holiday even marginally distracted from your sidewalk space measurements, you win.

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