Occupy Valentine's Day. This is the day to recognise love in every shape and size and disguise. Known love, new love, love's ghosts, love's hopes. Loss is here too, and the spaces in between love.

Reclaiming love is the best thing we can do. Love has been squatted for too long by those false cupids with their "for sale" signs. It's not a coincidence that Venus is the goddess of love and money. Or that her fat friend with the arrows lends his name to desire of both kinds. Cupidity is the all-consuming longing for riches. Love and money are both an exchange.

In 1967 100,000 or so idealists decided to occupy love – in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. They stood for communality, sharing, an end to excessive greed, and for peace. This was the Make Love not War generation.

The most conclusive response to this conscious, if chaotic, challenge by love's disciples to the supremacy of power and wealth happened in the mid-80s – the Thatcher/Reagan de-reg years, when money cloned itself as an alternative to every other expression of life. Wealth became the avatar of love; it's sinister flashy alter-ego. Love was for weekends. Love was a leisure activity. Hotels, flowers, chocolates, jewels, celebrity divorces, serial monogamy, porn and prenups. Love as commodity, like everything else. The upgrade generation realised that people could be traded in. Relationship not working? Get a new model.

What happened to love...