Let's soon celebrate de Clerambault's day

What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School is how they made an industry out of an emotional state - 'they' being first the greeting cards industry and then pretty much everyone else; the emotional state being that of the love fool, what the French call 'amour fou' - literally mad love, meaning a person who is besotted by another even though this feeling is not reciprocated or, at least, is very asymmetrical. Essentially, what Valentine's Day does is having a socially accepted mechanism by which, for one day, a person can proclaim one's love to another and get away with it. Because that other person will have to accept the token made universally, commercially okay.

The funny thing is, there is a delusional disorder, de Clerambault's Syndrome, named after a (French again!) psychiatrist who first classified it, which has the 'sufferer' believing another person to be infatuated with her or him. In other words, the opposite of what Valentine's Day subscribes to (and prescribes). Perhaps, with February 14 saturated, another day could be chosen, maybe named after another obscure Christian saint, where people give themselves gifts/flowers from someone they think fancies them. It smacks of self-love, yes. But that goes with the zeitgeist. Also, it could provide cover to folks with de Clerambault's for at least one happy, delusional day.