Be My Valentine?

Love, huh?

The ability for it should grow, be made to grow, be cultivated.

The objects of it change, often disappear or become demon versions of what they were.

'Romantic' love shapes itself within an amniotic sac, handling itself only in the most exegetical, self-definitional way. No wonder it's short-lived. Nine months? It should gestate that long! The membranes, the frontiers of self-contained environments, they stiffen, they fissure, they crack, and -- boo! -- a monster is born.

Hence the relative virtue of caritas, the love spun from the heart of religions -- and surely secularizable.

Without a sense of broader connection, of fellow-feeling, one gets the cynic -- not that justifiable version of cynic who questions establishment values, but the cynic soured on anything. Stunted.