Andrew Shaffer discusses his new book, “Great Philosophers who Failed at Love,” which he’ll present in Portsmouth on Valentine’s Day.

Author and blogger Andrew Shaffer has tackled a number of unorthodox topics with his humorous Order of St. Nick greeting cards. There are Atheist Christmas Cards, Divorce/Break-Up Cards, and Winter Solstice Cards. Most appropriate to the current season, however, are his Anti-Valentine’s Day Cards, many of which include peculiar quotes from famous philosophers on the subject of love.

“Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent,” says a wild-eyed, mustachioed Friedrich Nietzsche.

“Gloomy and painful as celibacy is, a bad marriage is much worse,” reports an austere Auguste Comte.

“Love is a serious mental disease,” says Plato.

The cards inspired Shaffer, creative director of Order of St. Nick, to write an entire book about the bumbling romantic exploits of Western philosophers. Initially, he hoped to include stories both happy and sad, joyous and heartbreaking. But his research yielded precious few examples of philosophers who enjoyed thriving love lives.

“As I started to investigate and look into their lives, I actually found it very difficult to find any who had succeeded at love,” Shaffer said. “It ended up being pretty one-sided.”

Hence the title of Shaffer’s new book, “Great Philosophers who Failed at Love,” which he’ll discuss at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth on Monday, Feb. 14. That’s Valentine’s Day, in case you hadn’t marked it on your calendar.

As it turns out, great thinkers have failed at love in a dizzying variety of ways. Some involve infidelity: Jean-Paul Sartre entertained nine different lovers at the same time when he was 74 years old (he also adopted one of his mistresses as his daughter). Others involve domestic violence: Louis Althusser “accidentally” strangled his wife while she was sleeping, and August Comte threw knives at his wife following a mental breakdown. And the mishaps are not reserved to men: Ayn Rand dedicated “Atlas Shrugged” to both her husband Frank and her lover Nathaniel. Still others lived lives of complete abstinence—whether they wanted to or not.

“They tended to be sort of extreme,” Shaffer said. “They would be a lifelong bachelor or they would fall in love with many women, or at least have dreams of a utopia where women would be shared communally or something. A lot of them have these really lofty ideas, whether it was ‘I don’t need love’ or ‘I need a lot of love.’”

Shaffer dedicates a few pages each to nearly 40 prominent thinkers in his book, from Socrates and Plato to Kant and Descarte to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Most of them, he said, did not appear to suffer too greatly from their misguided attempts at love. Although Sartre may have ruined several women’s lives, he did not seem to face negative personal consequences for his promiscuity.

But love may have driven others to sheer madness. A popular belief regarding Nietzsche is that he contracted syphilis after his doctor instructed him to sleep with a prostitute to improve his mood. The disease may have contributed to a mental collapse later in his life. Talk about a medical backfire.  

One might think that a miserable love life would affect one’s philosophical outlook. But Shaffer said most of the philosophers he researched omitted the topic of love altogether from their work.

“A lot of these guys either didn’t talk about love because it was sort of beneath them, or they just dismissed it as something that was just biology, not philosophy,” he said.

Some philosophers, however, did address the opposite sex in their writings. Aristotle, for instance, wrote that “women were ‘monstrosities’ of nature and little more than tamed animals,” Shaffer writes in his book.

History has been forgiving of such attitudes toward women, Shaffer said, because they are largely reflections of the times—much in the same way it’s accepted that Thomas Jefferson kept slaves (and slept with them). At the same time, however, the words of philosophers are held outside of time as transcendent nuggets of wisdom. History has shined a spotlight on the timeless quotations of philosophers like Aristotle, while ignoring the ones that would make modern readers cringe.

Shaffer has his own theory on why the world’s greatest thinkers have invariably proven inept at love.

“Mostly these guys were very dedicated, very obsessed with their work, and that’s not something that really lends itself to a stable home environment,” he said. “A lot of them were lifelong academics, so again, they never really got out much. Even the ones that did find love had enormous problems in their relationships.”

Shaffer, who got married in the spring of 2009, worked on the book during his honeymoon. He’s applied many of the lessons he learned to his personal relationship.

“It was actually very instructive. That was one of the things that I saw when I was researching it and writing it. I couldn’t get too into what I was doing to the point that I ignored those relationships in my life, whether with my wife or my family,” he said. “That just seems like what a lot of these guys did. They never stopped being who they were at work. They never stopped thinking when they were at home.”

Shaffer’s wife will be with him in Portsmouth. The Valentine’s Day event follows several appearances around the nation in the Naked Girls Reading series, in which nude women read literature (Shaffer promises to keep his clothes on at RiverRun).

He said his local presentation should be enjoyable for people regardless of their own romantic situations. Those spending the holiday alone can take solace in the fact that some of the world’s greatest minds faired even worse in the love department. And those with dates will seem like romantic titans compared to these philosophers.

“It’s really hard to do worse than some of these guys,” Shaffer said. “It should make anyone look good by comparison.”

The event begins at 7 p.m. on Feb. 14 at RiverRun Bookstore, 20 Congress St., Portsmouth, 603-431-2100.