Valentine’s Day. What does it bring to mind for you?

For some helpless romantics: ” … My heart expands, ’tis grown a bulge in it, inspired by your beauty, effulgent.” — Spike from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

For others — think hipsters — the day brings on a glossolalia seizure of rhetoric assaulting big business and industry with straw-man fallacies abounding.

Still others exist that have no longing to become lost in love’s embrace or fight against “the man.” These are frequently the folks you find dateless the night before and who have no intentions of trying to find a significant other. These folks, my friends, are the ones who profit most from Valentines Day.

These people are the PUAs, the pick-up artists.

While everyone else is caught up in their own identity crisis brought on by candy-heart syndrome, the PUA goes out the evening before Valentine’s Day knowing it is one of the easiest days to snag one or two or even more attractive women and not only not be looked down on for their attempts at a one-night stand, but thought fondly of in days still to come by the ladies who they wooed.

Do not get me wrong, women may also go out and pick up men in this fashion, but all women have to do to get a random single guy on any given night is to be forward; guys are suckers for an outright between-the-sheets romp offer. As to those following the same-sex interests, well, your odds go up equally on V-Day eve because the stigma of singleness can open a lot of people up to, ahem, broaden their horizons.

To gain the favor of a lady without a date, all the PUA has to do is go to a bar or club early and look for one of two things: The wild girl — sometimes called a “woo-girl” — that lacks her usual entourage of ladyfolk; or the girl stirring her own drink and not outright dismissing the slovenly drunk failing to communicate anything resembling the intimate conversation desired.

As soon as the PUA sees the wild girl, all that must be done is a forward walk toward the girl, followed by a casual stop as he walks past her and the strangers ogling her. It is almost an intimate moment; that moment when you see someone across the room and lock eyes and in a flash you comprehend myriad possibilities your lives would take. Then, as abruptly as the glance came, it goes and the crowd flows on. It is a look of that sort that will give the PUA his opening.

From there, all he has to do is reach out and bring the girl with him to the bar or anywhere at least slightly away from the crowd. Rarely will a woo-girl object to this new attention, as it carries with it a new adventure and possibility of an actual connection to ease their inner turmoil — i.e. the emptiness frequently surrounding their woo-boo-hoo-lives.

From here, it is child’s play for the PUA, as he uses simple directed and teasing questions about the girl and lets her find a connection in this clearly chivalrous suitor. Soon after they will go off to a more private location and make with a bit of the “ole in ‘n’ out.”

If the PUA happens to have not embraced the full Casanova logic, he may make plans instead to see the girl on the actual day of valentines and solidify his position of chivalrous pursuit. In which case, he will still not buy her dinner or take her out. It will be a coital meeting possibly followed or preceded by drinks that will also not be purchased by him for her.

As to the girl sitting more or less alone with the verbally-impaired simians rambling about something inane, the PUA is similarly situated to sweep her off her feet.

He can come forward and just jump into the barrage of potential mistakes; making certain to keep his conversation pointedly question-based about her while inserting the occasional jibe at the other wannabe alphas and even an occasional snipe at the girl for her possible interests in some of the future failures painstakingly laboring or lumbering about the room.

The route I would take, involves a more movie-inspired entrance: Walk up to her, take her hand ever so suavely and tell her, “Come with me for a moment, I have something to show you.” This forward move, though dangerous in your regular club setting, is golden to the girl out on V-Day eve at the bar — a girl at a bar on that eve of eves did not go to the bar in order to be left alone; those helpless romantics are at home with a bottle of wine watching “Sex In the City,” or reading Jane Austen.

Once she has walked off with the PUA — only a few steps away gents, please; you do not want to attempt to drag her far off and come across like a kidnapper — go ahead and sit her down to start into a new conversation making fun of the blokes she was previously entertaining and then her for sitting there and listening.

After a while, you will have come across as endearing and worthwhile — the conversation has moved on to other things at this point, and if you do not know how to hold a conversation, please do not try any of this and make the competent look bad — and with your worthiness will come the opportunity to relocate to her or your place, or even simply off to another location to continue the conversation. Regardless of the move, the end result will involve some bedroom exploration.

And if you succeed early in the evening, there is nothing stopping you from going back out or if you only made plans for the following evening, going on to the next bar and doing it all again.

So, for those out there lacking in love, go for a reasonable facsimile and enjoy an evening of a connection you can look back on years later and wonder “what if.” And for the rest of you heathens: Loosen up that wrist. Cheers.