Carrie Bradshaw is my kind of girl. She’s kooky, but endearing. She’s a writer, but can admit that her column reads like a classless Ann Landers. She has a cutesy fashion sense, even in pajamas. And I like her friends, too.

It’s just too bad she’s not real.

But I’m still in love with Carrie, the star of HBO’s “”Sex and the City,”” and it’s as close as I’ve gotten to love in my pathetically narrow and dull experience with relationships. Though reality’s confines argue that this companionship will inevitably shake out one-sided, I’ll argue back – if only to preserve one scrap of hope. After all, Carrie makes me laugh, and isn’t that the requisite hallmark of any healthy relationship? And I need her, or I’ll be all by my lonesome on Feb. 14.

This exercise – finding somebody, anybody to love on Valentine’s Day – requires the patience and naivete of idealists. There aren’t many of us left and it figures – trying to find love in under a week usually ends in front of the television on V-Day, knee-high in KFC and Dreyer’s Slow-Churned. Nobody wants the self-loathing that comes with that mess.

It’s more convenient, not to mention self-assuring, to eulogize love as Disney knows it: cuddly, gooey and schmaltzy. A colleague of mine, Ian Port, commented on that simplified take two years ago in this newspaper, calling it obsolete and tired, especially for a Generation Y weaned on muddled sexuality (Prince and Michael Jackson) and cloudy relationships (Charles and Diana). Love is entrenched in us all, he said, though it’s evolved into a culture of “”ambivalence”” toward more wholesome expressions. As an example, Port offered Jay-Z, who by rapping, “”I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one”” eroded any orthodox translation of love and relationships.

It’s not like anything has changed. Love-hating in hip-hop, a keen barometer for what today’s teens are thinking, is alive and well. Ex-convict and rapper Akon trades lyrics in his latest top-10 ditty to abide by radio standards – the difference between “”I wanna love you”” and “”I wanna fuck you”” tells us a lot about how we approach boxed chocolates, roses and other hokey devices that Port deemed as dead.

Two years later, that friend got married on a peninsula overlooking the Pacific. It was a sunny, almost cloudless summer day. He threw the garter and she threw the bouquet. After the ceremony, they released doves.

So love, the kind we wanted as children and ream as adults, must still be alive and well. It finds us all, in its most sentimental forms, sometime in our life. It’s our time away from love’s warm moments that breeds bitterness in its absence. Then we begin slipping deeper into cynicism, as the bitterness turns into resentment, which turns into, “”Why the fuck should I spend $100 on dinner, flowers and a card?”” which turns into, “”Why should I think about love on Valentine’s Day?””

You should because it’s worth it. The eternal pessimist can lambaste such sogginess one minute, then be downed by a maudlin gesture the next. The power of corniness validates Valentine’s Day.

So, sure, I’ll be eating KFC and Dreyer’s on the couch in six days. But I’ll have my girl Carrie with me.