I’m sitting in the VIP room at Cheeks on a Monday night, waxing philosophical about sex appeal with a pixie-faced girl whose stage name is Pepper.

We’d carved out a time on Friday to have dinner with my father, Ben, and his longtime girlfriend, Barbara. They’d driven more than two hours from their homes in Sarasota to meet us. Even I had to admit such effort was sweet—especially given they are both in their 80s—yet I was on my toes because tucked inside those sweet gestures often ticked a time bomb

When I was a little girl, my father used to bring home big, antebellum-opulent heart-shaped valentines boxes for my mother and me. It was a happy surprise, something I didn’t expect and didn’t need in order to feel loved.

A slide show of Jonathan Tercero's photographs featuring you are yours at your glorified best.

A recent scientific study, the story relayed, had analyzed the brains of people in happy relationships. A person newly in love, one researcher said, has approximately the same brain-chemical patterns as someone using cocaine. Feeling infatuated, starry-eyed and giggly? Think dopamine, oxytocin and vasopressin. Happy Valentine’s, Santa Fe.

This week's worth of what to do and how to do it for the lonesome, the love-addled and everyone in between.

Each house is divided into a grid according to feng shui, with nine general sections that correspond to various areas of life, such as family, wealth, career and creativity. Each section has a corresponding element (wood, fire, water, metal), color and shape. The love corner of every house is in its far right corner when one stands facing in the front door.

Given that I’m with what is essentially a group of strangers who, for the most part, met online to learn about sex arts, I feel quite comfortable and not sketched out. It isn’t (as I momentarily feared while walking behind an unknown couple up to the house) a swingers’ club or a cult offering Reeboks and punch.

For longer than anyone has believed in Aphrodite, much of the world has been obsessed with rhino horns and tiger testicles and toxic beetles—most have proven to be placebos at best. More recently, Western civilization has had to confront the inefficacy of cheap, mail-order Viagra.

The term Champagne applies strictly to sparkling wines from the Champagne region of France, located 90 miles east of Paris, where wine grapes have been cultivated for 2,000 years. But the term has been used—to the dismay of everyone who knows where Champagne is—for sparkling wines found elsewhere.