No, the boy you were cruel to in your adolescent years didn't die, but something in you did. You let a female friend dominate you long enough to ignore your own empathy, an ability totally necessary for any romantic connection to another person to be possible. In treating your "boyfriend" so cruelly on the most stereotypically romantic day of the year, you violated and wounded yourself far more than him. You can't remember the details because what you did was so abhorrent to you.

Thereafter, you may have played at having relationships, but the aspect of your personality that was capable of truly connecting with, loving and caring about another person wasn't available to you. Lacking that, your relationships haven't really been relationships. It's likely you haven't felt anything more for any of your relationship partners than you would for a casual roommate.

Help from someone with the right therapeutic skills and techniques could have brought the piece of you that you locked away by your own cruelty back to life long ago, but it sounds as if the passage of time and the patience and low-key approach of the current man in your life may slowly be unlocking the locks behind which you imprisoned your own romantic/empathetic self. Congratulations! But if you find that you have an irresistable urge to dump him as Valentine's day approaches, don't do it! Get therapy!... because that urge will prove that the damage you did yourself through your own cruelty is still affecting you very deeply and is not going to be healed without help.

First, let me toss aside the most common economic fallacy: that economics is not a zero-sum game, i.e. that anyone can make all the money they want if they just work hard enough, and it's corollary, if the rich get richer, it has no effect on the poor. The fact is, that AT ANY GIVEN TIME there is a finite amount of Gross Domestic Product (and the profits which proceed therefrom). If the rich are getting massively richer, then they are drawing to themselves, by hook or by crook, a larger percentage of the proceeds of the national economy. At that moment in time, the poor are, by simple mathematics, getting less of the value created by their work. Any theories put forward as to why this basic truth isn't really true are just B.S. designed to obscure that simple reality.

Second, it seems as if many of our so-called economic experts, mathematical geniuses though they be, are steadfastly avoiding studying the scariest facets of this current downturn. Massive numbers of folks have been living beyond their means on Plastic made so available by financial institutions. To cover their credit card debts, they have been drawing equity out of what had formerly been the ever-increasing value of their homes. The banks and mortgage companies have been railroading those folks into ever less desirable (but more profitable for the banks) mortgage instruments whose real terms were often hidden deep in the fine print and glossed over by the lender's agents. In this way the financial institutions have sucked greater and greater portions of their livelihood out of the pockets of regular working folks.

The drop in housing values has brought this very profitable system to a crashing halt. Suddenly we have billions of dollars of mortgages that will not be worth the paper they're printed on. Not only that, however, but the inability to draw equity from their homes to cover credit card debts means we will see huge increases in defaults on credit cards, on whose profits many banks are very dependent. The banks are laboring under the misconception that if they continue to play hardball with those moving into credit card default, piling on late fees, higher interest rates, and raising interest rates on even their best credit card customers etc. they can magically maintain their profits at what are clearly becoming unsustainable levels. Thus will the banks stubbornly pursue policies which only exacerbate the problem, driving folks into bankruptcy and more reliable customers into default.

These problems have been created by the way financial institutions have become completely addicted to living the high life accomplished by their unregulated ability to suck ever more money out of the public's pockets. Somehow, they put all their financial experts to work designing ever-more-creative ways to suck in more and more money (even from each other). Evidently there was no one left to notice that the day was rapidly approaching when the source of their massive profits would run dry. That day is here. Much of the general populace has no money. Many are going to lose their homes. Those who don't will have no discretionary income for years to come because they'll be too busy trying to keep up their ever-increasing mortgage and credit card payments. The party's over, folks!