Of course, you are the target audience.

Seems every February some irresistible force (chocolate?) compels me to write about Valentine's Day, our yearly romantic revelry, the pink and lace and lovey-dovey 14th, a day I have finagled, fumbled and completely flubbed a number of times.

My lack of skills is a poor yardstick, however. To make the one day we have designated for love work, millions of romantics the real, the imagined and the simply guilt-ridden will spend billions of dollars. That's amore!

And a lot of money.

I'm wondering about Feb. 15, however, after the candlelit dinners have been digested, the limousines parked, the roses are bending their way toward wilt and that red silk number is on its way to the dry cleaners. What's love got to do with us then?

I ask because, if love is Thursday's password, it can't come soon enough, not at the rate at which we are killing and maiming each other; not at the depth of our enmity toward entire groups of neighbors allegedly ruining our lives; not at the pace at which our distrust of one another grows.

You are right: Neither a box of 72-percent cocoa dark chocolate with raspberries nor a dozen long-stem red beauties will keep us from pounding one another with sticks, stones and words.

But for a nation that professes love brotherly, sisterly, tough, romantic, platonic and St. Valentine's we seem to revel in our hardened edges.

Wall scratchings

OK, OK, you're not going to love everyone. I suppose that means not everyone will love you either.

I'm simply wondering about the dichotomy that Thursday will bring, when we'll traffic in romance and flowers and sweet nothings while outside on the sidewalk we'll be staring at a fist fight maybe even cheering.

Yes, we can categorize love as I did above with impunity. That allows me to take my wife to dinner this week, surprise her with a bauble over dessert and then go home and slit my neighbor's tires with justification because his St. Bernard keeps leaving large biscuits in my front yard.

My nickel says all love has a common thread, an unmistakable strand of DNA we can find in a Hallmark card, in the passion and confusion of a first kiss, in our infatuation with you-know-who in the next cubicle, in the sweet and sincere attachment of lifelong friends, in the conditionless country known as family.

Such ubiquity means love has generated the longest continuum of thought since we scratched the walls of caves, an endless forum on our single, most powerful feeling. For example, the Bible, specifically John, said, "For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another."

Our friend Forrest Gump reminded us that the feeling is neither exclusive nor has entrance requirements. "I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is."

Speaking of smarts, the world's biggest brain, Albert Einstein, knew that, despite formulas and equations and solid science, sometimes hearts can be neither qualified nor quantified. "Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love," he said.

Intramural throwdown

Finally, a Valentine's Day in an election year can tear a hole in the universe and still not affect bonbon sales. Based on recent behavior, 2008 promises to be neither better nor worse than usual.

That translates to plenty of political fighting, highlighted to date by two squabbles: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who to their credit have toned it down, although I doubt flowers will be exchanged Thursday, and a rather nasty intramural throwdown among conservative Republicans over the ideological bona fides of presumptive presidential nominee John McCain.

I hold no illusion that we will approach anything that resembles mutual respect, let alone love not even Thursday.

Sweet as milk chocolate, however, would be the widespread recognition that the L-word, our most powerful in any of its forms, actually works.

George Ayoub is senior writer at The Independent.