by Dr. Susan Block.

Valentine’s Day is on its way, the shopping sites flashing rosy red hearts, but I’ve got the Valentine blues… how about you?

It’s my first V-Day in over three decades without my beloved Captain Max (RIP Max 11/8/1943 – 5/13/2025), aka Pr. Maximillian R. Leblovic Lobkowicz di Filangieri, aka Mickey, my husband of 33 years, publisher, producer, butler, witness, Great Love and #1 lover, my Valentine.

I miss Max every day in so many big and little ways. It’s personal, of course, and Valentine’s Day is a very personal – as opposed to religious or patriotic – holiday, whether you celebrate with hearts and flowers, whips and panties, tears and recriminations, or platinum and pre-nups.

Yet politics affects us personally, and V-Day 2026 may be particularly tough to navigate through all the dystopian violence, lies from on high, political division and sexual suspicion.  Sprinkle in vicious fascism, über-militarism, infuriating nepotism, hyper-monetization, rampant censorship, environmental devastation, deep interpersonal alienation and the utter emotional exhaustion of it all – and who gives a candied heart about effing Valentine’s Day?

But V-Day is D-Day for Lovers, the High Holiday of Love. High or lowbrow, as everyone knows, it ought to be special, romantic, heartfelt, passionate, in the pink and perfect… and it hardly ever is.

Indeed, ever since its brutal Medieval imposition on the Pan-loving peoples of early Christendom, the artificially sweetened festival of forced fake love called the Feast of Saint Valentine has fostered far more pain (St. Valentine’s Day Massacre anyone?) than pleasure.

V-Day Widow

What can you do for the Valentine blues? There is no cure. I’m no Erika Kirk – bragging about how much cash she stashed from Charlie’s mega-funeral – but putting together another “Max Collage” has helped to put me in the pink, with streaks of Valentine red, Lupercalian scarlet and bonobo rose.  Sailing through images of Max from Valentines Past is a bittersweet journey on the high seas of so many heartfelt memories.

Snapshots from France trigger remembrances of Valentine’s eve, 2002: Max waiting for me on a bustling French Riviera street corner as I emerge from a taxi, flying like a fighter jet into his warm strong arms, the boulevard crowd cheering, “C’est l’amour!” – as if we’re all in a French New Wave movie.

Not that Max and I were Jean-Luc Godard, though Breathless was a favorite Valentine flick, and we filmed many of our V-Days in Bonoboville, plus a few during Sex Week at Yale, a decade of great sex-educational Valentine Seasons… until a well-funded religious group forced a cowardly Yale to shut it down. Then there was V-Day 2017, canoodling on Venice Beach as the sun set into the Pacific, many great Lupercalias in Bonoboville, a World Bonobo Day at the Zoo and a delicious V-Day 2024 of chocolate, storytelling, Absinthe and orgasms, swathed in our Palestinian keffiyehs. That was our last Holiday of Hearts before Max was struck like lightning by a terrible stroke that paralyzed the entire right side of his body, and the left (rational) side of his brain.

On V-Day 2025, there were no Valentine orgasms for me and Max. In Hollywood-Kaiser hospital’s stroke ward, Max couldn’t even eat the Valentine chocolates I brought him, though he did lick one chocolate and grin with a little pleasure – or just a remembrance of pleasures past – and we shared a few chocolate-flavored kisses, flowers, hand squeezes and a slurred “I love you” between medical procedures. Now even that’s gone. Bella Ciao, bye-bye love.

Sigh. Valentine’s Day is not for widows, Brothers and Sisters, Lovers and Sinners. Especially not during these challenging times for love of all kinds.

Sexless Saint Valentine

To be sure, V-Day Fatigue goes much farther back than “these times,” horrifying as they are. Though Max and I ate up romance on the daily, we were never hungry for Valentine’s Day. Like a strawberry glazed in sugary, chemical-laced icing; the real juicy fruit is in there somewhere, but the sickly-sweet frosting disguises, sanitizes and monetizes it beyond recognition… then leaves you with a toothache.

“Friends, Romans, Countrywomen, lend me your ears,” to rephrase Shakespeare’s Marc Antony, “I’ve come to bury Valentine’s Day, not to praise it.”

Concocted by the early Catholic Church, shaped by the Victorian greeting card industry, sweetened by See’s, polished by DeBeers and abetted by Amazon, all this Hallmark Classic Fakery is based upon a cute and sexless Christian romance starring the celibate Saint Valentine.

As the story opens in 4^th century pagan Rome (Max’s birthplace), mean old Emperor Claudius has outlawed marriage in a vain attempt to restore potency to his weakening imperial army. After all, when you make love, you’re less inclined to make war, and Claudius wants fighters not lovers. Enter Valentine, a Christian priest arrested for marrying couples in secret who, while awaiting execution, converts his jailer’s blind daughter to Christianity, whereupon she falls madly (but chastely) in love with him. Then, just after the priest’s execution, the jailer’s blind daughter finds a card in his cell addressed to her and signed, “Your Valentine.” Not only is she deeply moved by this loving gesture, but the fact that she can now see the card means Valentine’s saintly ophthalmological skills have cured her of her blindness.

What a touching tale of pure ideals! But alas and alack (a big lack), the ideal is the enemy of the real, as Max used to say, and in reality, there were several Christian martyrs named “Valentine,” and no evidence that any of them healed a jailer’s blind daughter or left her a farewell card.

However, the ideal is more compelling than the real – as well as more marketable – according to Hallmark, See’s, DeBeers and Amazon, who have worked hard over the centuries to provide tools for a V-Day fraught with pressure (the enemy of pleasure) to purchase their products that simulate the real romance that money just can’t buy.

Lupercalia: The Original Valentine’s Day

How can anyone find or share true love and romance when such virulent hate, war, genocide, police brutality, ICE insanity and profound grief – for the innocent victims of the current madness, for our loved ones, for the world – bleeds out through our newsfeeds, onto our streets and into our lives?

That’s a trillion-dollar question that I, in my widow’s grief, am in no shape to answer. However, if your current need is just to have a good, stimulating, less commercial, more authentic V-Day, then, as the influencers say, do your research! You’ll discover what Max and I learned in the early, pre-AI 2000s: that deep inside the phony, chaste Valentine glaze is the original, primeval, communal, whip-smacking, heartfelt feast for all the senses – including your sense of history – with nothing saintly or celibate about it.

Festeggiamo LUPERCALIA!

As for the “whip-smacking,” it was done with little goatskin whips called Februa, from which we derive our month of February, and from this we learn that the Lupercalian heart of the season has always been a little kinky.

So… if the candy-coated stress of Valentine’s Day gives you a toothache, don’t beat yourself up over it—beat someone else! And no, you ammosexual incels and ICE thugs out there, that is NOT a call to violence or abuse of any kind. On the contrary, I’m simply and peacefully suggesting that you give your special someone a consenting-adult flogging to celebrate the original, primeval, pre-Roman V-Day of Lupercalia…. Or, better yet, take one yourself. I’m sure you deserve it.

Best to restrict Lupercalian floggings to between you and your “special someone,” since consent can be a lot tougher to read in party settings. That said, the most authentic way to reclaim V-Day’s Lupercalian roots is communally (besides, not everyone has a special someone), and in that spirit, for almost two decades, Max and I whipped up wild, wolf-howling Lupercals at the little Love Church of The Bonobo Way in the village of Bonoboville.

To dramatize our political points, we’d stage public Lupercalian floggings of submissive volunteers masked as authoritarian characters such as Trump, Putin, Bush, Cheney, Zuckerberg, Bezos and Kavanaugh, Commedia del’Arte-style. Yet the passion of Lupercalia is beyond the political and even the personal. It’s beyond human, as it marks the coming of spring for all of Mother Earth’s fauna and flora with organic, erotic, ecosexual purification – communal ecstasy rather than the hopelessly unromantic monetization of St. Valentine and Amazon.

Maybe it’s my grief talking, but Lupercalia beats a broken heart and an empty wallet any V-Day.

V-Day is World Bonobo Day

Broken-hearted or blissful, married, single, in a couple, a throuple, a commune or a convent, you can honor love with the world’s greatest lovers and officially go bonobos on Valentine’s Day because Valentine’s Day, February 14^th, thanks to U.S. House Resolution 738 (115^th Congress, 2018) is also World Bonobo Day.

If any nonhuman animal embodies the spirit of true love, it’s the “make love not war” bonobo ape. You can gain Valentine inspiration to live in more loving ways from the source: the remarkable Love Apes of the rainforest. Our closest genetic cousins, bonobos are also the Peace Apes, having never been seen killing each other in the wild or captivity (thus far!).

Max and I were inspired by bonobos every day of our love lives together since we first *discovered* them on PBS in 1993.  Here’s an intriguing Valentine connection: the bonobo’s Latin name is Pan paniscus. So, Lupercalia and World Bonobo Day are linked through Pan, the Spirit of the Wild… and certainly no “Saint.”

Gift Idea: Make a donation in your Valentine’s name to Lola ya Bonobo and/or Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI), both actively helping to save the wild bonobos from extinction, and give them the receipt inside a Valentine card.

Gift Idea 2: Give The Bonobo Way for Valentine’s Day to friends, lovers and your friends’ lovers. Spread the Bonobo Word of Love from the Love Apes. Give it to someone you love, even if that someone is YOU.

In these times of escalating brutality under color of law, greed, injustice, degradation and sorrow, just the existence of bonobos is a heartening reminder that peace through pleasure is possible for apes like us. It sure helps to keep this V-Day Widow going amid all the grief and madness.

This February 14, honor World Bonobo Day. Stop the killing. Break the ICE. Spread the love.

Need to Talk?

If you really want to “go bonobos” – or Lupercalian – you might also want to give yourself the Valentine gift of telephone sex therapy with the Dr. Susan Block Institute.

Release your “inner bonobo,” learn to please your Valentine, discover more about yourself and why you might not have a Valentine, go under Valentine Erotic Hypnosis for the ultimate hearts-and-flowers fantasy, enter the Erotic Theater of the Mind and roleplay a stimulating Lupercalian spanking, explore other kinks, transformations and fetishes, or just delve deeply into whatever you need to talk about that you can’t talk about anywhere else. You can talk to us.

Whatever you’re going through, we’re here for you …

With Valentine Bonobo Lupercalian Love,
Dr. Suzy

 

If and when you’re in the mood, click these links for stories of my Valentine Max’s extraordinary life, heartbreaking death and inspirational legacy of love:

“RIP Max”
On Substack
X/Twitter Thread

“Maximillian Lobkowicz di Filangieri Obituary”
On Substack
On Dignity Memorial
On Counterpunch

“Cremating Captain Max”
On Substack

“Bottomless Grief & Topless Cake”
On Substack
On Counterpunch

“Max to the Maximus” Memorial
PR in AVN, Xbiz & ASN.
On Substack

My Beloved Max Collage Collection
Max Collage 1: “Family History”
On Substack

Max Collage 2: “On DrSuzy.Tv”
On Substack

Max Collage 3: Travels with Max in France
On Substack

Max Collage 4: Winter Holidays
On Substack

© January 29,  2026  Susan Block, Ph.D., a.k.a. “Dr. Suzy,” is a world renowned LA sexologist, author of The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure, occasionally seen on HBO and other channels. For information, call 626-461-5950.