As an office worker, I believe all Health & Safety notices should address a number of dangerous fallacies that pepper our idle chit chat:

1. Love is not all you need; it comes a poor 93rd, behind food, water, good books, tea, custard creams, sex (see point 2) and many more.
2. Love and sex are like dancing and music; they can intersect, but are entirely different. Admittedly, it is easier to imagine music without dancing than vice versa, and you should decide for yourself which is which.
3. They are not all bastards; statistically, how could they be?
4. They don't always let you down in the end, unless you're reproaching them for being mortal in which case your standards are impossibly high.
5. You don't need to find the right person; if your needs are basic, almost anyone will do.
6. There isn't someone for everyone, mainly because They haven't learned to clone and pair us yet.
7. You can live without him or her, subject to medical advice.
8. "But I love him/her" is an infantile way of saying your partner should be in Broadmoor and you're horribly trapped.
9. There are plenty more fish in the sea, but many of the appetising varieties have been depleted by industrial trawling, leaving plenty of unappetising or toxic species twitching in your net.
10. We all die alone, philosophically speaking, unless the lyrics of 'Don't Fear The Reaper' are to be believed.
11. You can stand the pain. You haven't had an industrial accident.
12. You will survive. Even if you neither know nor care how to love, I'm sure you'll stay alive, again subject to medical advice.

I'm not sure it would do any good because we're all so in love with love. We think it's something Promethean, a transcendent force that sets us aloft on fluffy swan's wings, like the pretty naked people on those 'Wings of Love' pictures so popular in the 1970's. Yet the snarling cynic in me thinks that most of our courtship rituals better deserve a David Attenborough narrative.

We think of ourselves as highly evolved and self-aware, unlike mere animals with their unthinking and predictable patterns of behaviour. Yet any town-centre on a Friday night suggests otherwise. The alpha-males suck up ten pints of Stella at the watering hole then begin their rutting displays watched by beta-males in CCTV suites. The females suck up twenty Bacardi Breezers then find various ways to shake their tail-feathers and grapple with the ladette dilemma: are they predators or prey? Whatever demographic we belong to, we all obey the same rules. Whether we're trading punches on the High Street or trading witty apercus about particle physics, we're all just fireworks launched by our DNA.

Yet we feel compelled to gild this passion flower. A brave soul of my acquaintance was known at work as the Doctor of Strong Feelings, partly because he was a doctor but mainly because he once admitted he'd never told his partner of ten years that he loved her. He disdained 'love' for the soggy, imprecise catch-all it has become, and preferred to tell her how he felt in honest and meaningful terms. I hope she appreciated his stand, but I never did learn precisely which strong feelings he held.

The word 'love' is certainly abused, and can bear a variety of meanings which are seldom explicit. It can signify sensual enchantment or an attempt to part someone from their pants and good judgement. The speaker may be worshipping someone for all their rapturous, ineffable quiddity, suddenly understanding what all those songs and poems were about. They may equally well be saying it simply because all concerned expect it, making it no more than habit. Love as a vague, unthinking sop to cultural expectation certainly dares to speak its name.
It is wonderful to find someone who can excite, delight and ignite you; who can tolerate your faults without having too many of their own; who can help you exceed yourself. I'm lucky to have managed that, and I would certainly call it love according to guidelines issued by the Doctor of Strong Feelings.

And I’m very pleased with myself for sidestepping all that irrational sentiment, which makes me wonder why I’m ranting on about this at all. My wife thinks it stems from unresolved feelings of bitterness towards my hideous, filth-laden, leprous harpy of an ex-girlfriend. Plainly, I have no strong feelings of any kind about her and prefer to believe that the whole relationship was a fiction.