This is just another day, a Tuesday to be exact, but it's also the day that our commercial culture dictates that men show women love. Love of course means buying things, so right there we have a problem. The implication behind gifts, that we cannot afford anything ourselves because we don't have jobs, messes up the supposed purity of the exchange straight away. And it just goes downhill from there. Men follow their script, that they don't know how/what to buy, that expressing love is something so far from their capability that they have to act like ignorant children, which they most definitely are not. Advertising supports this image of men as doofuses. Let's reject it!

And women, told that we are nothing without male attention, follow our script and wait for someone to buy the right thing so we can feel good about ourselves. This recipe for disaster certainly accounts for the miserable status of heterosexual relations at this point in history. Men are reared to not show affection, women are reared to crave it from men exclusively. How is that supposed to work?

Happily there's solutions to the problem! Raise your boys to show love, to do the emotional work of nurturing that we currently force entirely onto women. Raise your girls to be individuals, happy to nurture and just as happy to make their own way the world. As for you, write your own script. What would you like to get today? Go get it. What would you to do today? Go do it. What would you like to hear today? Go say it to yourself. Be your own lover.

Most importantly, ask yourself who you can help today. Instead of waiting around to get love, go give it. Call an elderly relative, give some money to someone who needs it, let that stranger pull in front of you in traffic. Repeat every day. I can guarantee you you won't miss the crappy flowers and obligatory junk.