Love

• You will experience feelings of excitement, joy and desire.
• You will place the other person's happiness above your own.
• Your friends will hate you.

• Your wallet will be lighter.
• You will hit things less.
• You will no longer be fun.

• You cannot feel love. Proceed to repair bay to correct this anomaly.

• Threaten to hurt yourself
• Tattoo their portrait in miniature on your nipples
• Name a newly discovered species after them

And of course, ourselves.

These are the only recorded instances of love:

Your Mom - The way I hear it, your Mom let the Kiwanis Club run an epic train on her.

Romeo & Juliet - The timeless story of a fickle man-slut and his one-week romance with a thirteen-year-old girl. SPOILER ALERT: They die.

Tristan & Iseult - A young couple falls for one another after swallowing a love potion. This is the first known use of roofies. It's also the only way first time someone named "Iseult" was able to find love.

Dido & Aeneas - The Queen of Carthage kills herself in despair when her lover abandons her to found Rome. Just like a Trojan prince, am I right, ladies? We've all been there!

Johnny Cash & June Carter - When you'd rather go to church than party like a rockstar, but remain bad-ass? That's when it's love.

Pizza -- Pizza is fucking DELICIOUS. I love pizza!

Get over here, you minx.

Platonic -- Non-sexual love between a woman who dates jerks and a wimp who worships her. His fear of rejection and her willful ignorance continue until one of them settles.

Agape -- General love for all humanity. Espoused by Jesus, invented by Mr. Rogers.

Christian love^TM -- A bootleg version of agape with loopholes to completely disregard Christ's teachings.

Maybe now you won't spend all your time with a dozen other dudes!

Eros -- Hot dog! Now we're in the good stuff! Eros is the wet and sticky kind of love that makes people do stupid things, like go to romantic comedies. These movies have titles like Lookin' for Love 2: Sassy in All the Wrong Places. If you're not in love, the trailer will warn you away by walking a character into a tree.

Is he holding--OH. Whew!

Eros is represented as a chubby baby with wings and weapons -- the least erotic thing imaginable, unless you've seen Christopher Walken eat an ice cream cone.

See, now you can't stop thinking about that.

Eroticism is highly subjective. One person may find the Brooklyn Bridge sexy, with its rigid columns of block and precise web of taut, steel cables flung straining against the sky, while another person who's clearly a pervert is turned on by women's feet.

There are a few things things we all find sexy: burst condoms, whale calls, smearing the word "PIG" on our lover's face with chocolate pudding...and of course, the sweet oblivion waiting at the end of a gun barrel.

In order to map this erogenous diversion, we must ask, "Does it make a naked Angelina Jolie less sexy?"

You're welcome for getting Walken out of your head.

--Angelina Jolie indicates our root libido. She's so hot she lights a cigarette by kissing the tip. If Angelina Jolie rapes you, the judge dismisses the case for lack of evidence. When a male friend dies, she's not allowed into the funeral until they nail shut the lower half of the coffin. If she starred in a musical about Anne Frank, gay Neo-Nazis would get circumcised just to start a conversation. The reason the universe is expanding is because Angelina Jolie is arousing it.

--The horse represents your own perversions: chains, body hair, exercise -- everything that exhilarates you, but is distasteful to people who don't share your fetish for gluing nostrils shut.

The point where your personal tastes intersect with the collective fantasy is the cut-off for what you're allowed to ask of your partner. A leather bridle is within your bedroom rights, but a live animal leeches the erotic power of nuzzling Ms. Jolie's breast.

--The Billy Bob Thornton Anti-Erotic Horizon is the firm line of things that are never acceptable in the bedroom, even as hypotheticals: Mother Teresa costumes, the undead, and anything you've already eaten. A good way to tell if something crosses the Billy Bob Thornton Anti-Erotic Horizon is to ask, "Would you do that for Tom Petty?" Sadly, the answer is always no.

As with all pseudo-sciences, proving love exists is difficult because its effects are in the user's mind. Believers in love make unsubstantiated claims of outrageous health benefits for lovers: lower blood pressure, longer lifespan, and having someone else to cook for you. They even go so far as to say the crushing agony of living is less burdensome!

These deluded fools probably think they're happy.
Happy Valentine's Day Alice. I love you.
_{3 / 3 / 11 -- God, I miss her.}

Poppycock! Discrediting love is important, because it interferes with humanity's long culture of parents trading their children for farm animals. If love did exist, the richest men in the land would have hoarded it, charging the vulgar masses billions in sterling for this great delight.

Marx's love letters warned us about this.

This Valentine's Day, as you purchase your beloved a box of the driest chocolates, gaze distractedly at more attractive couples around the room, and present her with a card written by an unpaid intern in Cleveland (you don't have to give her the card in Cleveland if there's a more convenient city near you), be thankful you are free of such hypothetical tyrannies of the mind.

Unless you really are in love -- in which case hold her tight, you beautiful bastard.

Brendan McGinley makes cool webcomics. He would love for you to come upstairs and see his etchings.