Leonard Verea | Valentine''s Day | Nick Hornby | Brazil

I figured I had two routes available to me to accomplish this. I could make a year-by-year list of girlfriends I've had since 1986, track them down, and ask them what we did for Valentine's Day this year and that year.

But I figured that was too Nick Hornby, as well as borderline stalkerish. So, naturally, that left one choice: hypnotism.

Since at the time of this writing I was spending a month in Brazil - you know, to find a new girlfriend - this proved a challenging task. Not only did I need a hypnotist (not exactly filling as many yellow pages as dating services and psychologists), but one who spoke English as well. A friend pointed me to Dr. Leonard Verea and his namesake institute, Instituto Verea/Sociedade Brasileira de Hipnose Clínica e Dinâmica (Verea Institute/Brazilian Society of Clinical Hypnosis and Dynamics).

In slightly broken English, Dr. Verea probed my feelings about Valentine's Day and love. Do I associate the two? Of course. Is it an important day to me? It can be. If I don't remember any recent Valentine's Days, do I at least possess memories of other days in my most recent relationship? Sure. How about February 10? No way.

Dr. Verea concluded, after additional probing, that I associate love with my last relationship (true), and that once the relationship ended, all of my memories of things I associated with love vanished along with it. Right. Down. The. Drain.

Fair enough. But could I get them back? "If you do not want to remember, nobody can make you remember," he told me. An entirely different question altogether, and one that prompted another query: Did I really want to remember the memories themselves, or did I simply want to know why I didn't remember them?