I warn you folks, this is no time of year to plop in “Pretty in Pink” and start to remember all those great memories you had with your ex on past Valentine’s Days. You’ll wake up drunk with a smelly container of cottage cheese on your stomach.

And, as I have learned in the worst way, a person can be arrested for holding a boom box outside a girlfriend’s window. I guess someone, somewhere – probably a heartless eunuch -believes that is what they would consider “scary”, maybe “obsessive.” Just maybe.

But for all the cracked-out ideas that occurred in the’80s, excluding Reaganomics, they had the right sappy idea. Display your emotions to someone you care about, don’t masque them in zealous pride.

Thirty years ago, my father never had to play a ‘game’ with my mother in order to woo her. He never had to worry when was the right time to call and when it made him look weak to dial in her digits or analyze every damned word that escaped his mouth, pondering what lasting impression does that word and connotation leave?

Does a person have to have a good vertical or be able to run a sub-4.7 40-meter dash to be successful at this so-called game? I am confused; what is the game?

Dating is becoming way too complex. None of our parents had to consult a magazine article, reading “10 ways to please her in bed” to know how to hook up with someone they wanted to get with.

It was simple – care a bit about the person and the rest will be fine. Of course, I have Cabbage Patch midget hands and a perpetual uphill battle to conquer every time I climb into bed with a potential mate.

The whole aspect that the way to get a person into bed or into your life is called ‘game’ bugs the living poo out of me. Dating is not a game. More people’s heads are screwed up in ways a person can’t articulate because someone thought dating was a game. This whole thought process our generation has on dating is out of whack. Breaking up should not be the end of all communication between two people who spent every moment in each other’s arms over certain duration of time. It is simply a choice to cease being physically involved with another.

And the gauge to see who ‘won’ the game in the breakup is who of the two is more emotionally distraught. Does that make them feel good? If I knew I maliciously ruined so and so’s life belt a week or eternity, though it’d never happen (I don’t have the looks for it) I’d go to one of the shrinks on campus and say “Hey Doc, I am one sick bastard… Got any Vicodin?”

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, the college dating landscape should ponder a change in all our approach. And maybe this is the Valentine’s Day sap that pours out of me. God, I hope not. But those in a relationship should actually show someone how much they care about their special somebody, not just with some superficiality. Those who are not and are looking, maybe we should just lose the game.

If not for you, do it for me. I am getting lonely.