Valentine’s Day is coming on like the idle loner who wants to get personal while I stand at the bar waiting for my drink.

At the moment, I’m not feeling very romantic. But maybe there’s a cure somewhere.

Maybe they’re selling it at Weia Teia for $1.50 a pop. Maybe it’s exactly what we all need here at Oberlin, where (am I the only person who’s ever noticed this?) sometimes the giving and receiving of sweet loving is replaced by learning and labor as the top priority.

Oysters have been considered an aphrodisiac for centuries, although to date there is no credible biological reason why this would be so.

Apparently Casanova ate fifty raw oysters a day to enhance his “magnetism” (according to the highly authoritative scholars at aboutaphrodisiacs.com).

Regardless of the fallacy of oyster love-magic, they are nonetheless associated with sexual desire, and it is for this reason that Weia Teia is offering them, for a limited time only (until just before Valentine’s Day, actually) at a relatively reasonable price.

Theirs are raw Malpeque oysters shipped in daily from the oyster beds off Canada’s Prince Edward Island.

As far as I can tell, the sexiest thing about oysters is their ambiguity—more specifically, the mysterious nature of mollusks in general. While idling with one’s lover over a dozen raw oysters on ice, one might be compelled to wonder, “How do oysters make love?”

Luckily for you, I am writing this column for credit and therefore am occasionally compelled to do some research.

Like most members of the mollusk genus, oysters are generally either male or female, although her maphrodites are not uncommon. Driving reproduction, the male and female secrete their respective sperm and egg, and the fertilization goes in a free-floating fashion beneath the waves.

Once eggs are fertilized, they sink to a safe place on the floor of the bay or stream to get started on the emotional rollercoaster of growing up.

Oysters are unique in that some are able to raise their young as both the male and female parent. It is not uncommon for an oyster parent to raise its offspring inside its own shell during the beginning stages of life, switching its sexual identity back and forth from male to female as it plays out the roles of parenting.

Even though the eternally fearful FDA warns Americans to eat raw seafood at their own risk, they are infinitely more sexy raw.

If you’re going to get some kind of food poisoning in your life, better that it be from some succulent sea creature than from some gnarly undercooked antibiotic-basted chicken leg. (Although, truth be told, I’ve heard that seafood poisoning is the Olympics to poultry poisoning’s amateur badminton league).

There is no conceivable way that any reader of this column will be able to find affordable raw oysters to prepare for his / her lover in his / her home or dorm room.

You’ll have to head down to the ’Tei, where the chef has created a sauce for his oysters about which he is highly secretive.

If you’re feeling flush and have reached your twenty-first year, go ahead and order shots of Grey Goose vodka as an accompaniment.

Or, you can go to the IGA and buy a little tin of smoked oysters, which, although about as sexy as muddy shoelaces, are pretty delightful.