Today is Valentine’s Day That curious annual observance in which devotion is expressed through the anxious purchase of price-gouged floral arrangements, hastily procured chocolates, and the strange, obligatory recitation of Hallmark-approved sentimentality. It is a day that manages, quite impressively, to inspire both grandiloquent displays of affection and a certain reflexive cynicism—two forces locked in a perpetual waltz, each as predictable as the other. And yet, for all the performative absurdities, for all the ways in which a natural and noble sentiment is commodified into some lurid facsimile of itself, we conservatives would do well to resist the temptation to...