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Valentine's Day is a holiday for couples. But also for studies about couples, local news stories about couples, and bitter rants by unlikable single women who write articles for the Internet.

I'm sans date this year, so I'm doing my part by providing the following list of awesome dead people who chose to die alone.

You think Pascal would have come up with his eponymous triangle if he was sitting around cuddling with his wife, swapping sections of the Sunday paper and making brunch plans? Would Elizabeth I have defeated the Spanish Armada if she was spooning? Would Da Vinci ever have invented helicopters if he was rolling around on a bearskin rug with somebody he felt deeply for? NO.

So, Beyoncé? Put a ring on my imaginary balls. Here's to you, unlovable cat people lone wolves!

Nikola Tesla
For a dude who spent a most of his time building massive, wang-shaped structures, Tesla seemed to prefer the company of physics and ballistics to penises and vagoos; his biographers pretty much concur that it's likely he died without ever having his Bifilar coil oscillated.

Though anecdotal evidence suggests that Tesla was hawwwwt, he was apparently never feeling it. In a 1926 interview with Colliers, he told a reporter, "There are the vast, desexualized armies of workers whose sole aim and happiness in life is hard work." Career girls take note: Put your job first, die alone, and get a sweet metal band named after you. Suck it, marrieds.

Emily Dickinson
Yeah, OK, when you think of Emily Dickinson you probably think of tragic, mentally unhinged unstable-y types. But scholars speculate that her candle may have burned at both ends, so to speak; she wrote impassioned letters to Susan Gilbert, a woman who would later marry her brother (ICE BURN, Susan), and exchanged effusive correspondence with Charles Wadsworth, a man she referred to often as only "my Philadelphia."

She died alone at 56, but she seemed cool with it -- when a friend had expressed concern over her solitude, she wrote that her dearest companions were "the Hills, sir, and the Sundown, and a Dog large as myself, that my Father bought me." Same here. You know, the hills. The sundown. Bourbon.

Jane Austen
If sexy movies and Wikipedia are to be believed, Austen was unceremoniously dumped at 20 by Tom Lefroy, a hot lawyer whose family didn't approve of her social station (sooooo Austen). Later on in life, she accepted the marriage proposal of a dorky family friend, but rescinded it the next morning. (Punch goggles?)

Ultimately, Jane never found anybody whom she liked who liked her back, and she Was Cool With This. In a letter to her niece, Jane wrote, "Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection." Tom Lefroy later married a lady named Mary and called their first daughter Jane. Sucks to be you, Mary.

John Keats
The "Ode to a Nightingale" poet was once engaged to 18-year-old Fanny Brawne, despite the fact that her family disapproved of his poverty and tendency to cough chunks of lung into his hanky. They exchanged a lot of steamy letters (if not fluids), but Keats knew that the TB was a-going to get him and got sort of obsessed with the idea of dying, writing Fanny, "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks: your loveliness and the hour of my death." (We girls love that dark sh**.)

When it was clear he was not going to have any kind of miraculous turnaround, he broke off the engagement and moved to Italy, where he died alone and penniless. Why? Because it was polite, that's why.

Katherine Anne Porter
If you haven't read Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," you're missing out on some of the most romantic/devastating fiction ever written. Porter herself (in the awesome hat at right) was a bit of a lady-cad in real life; a 28-year-old piece of grad student beefcake named Albert Erskine dumped her when he discovered that she wasn't his age after all -- she just looked remarkably young for almost 50 (GET IT, GIRL).

At that point, she took herself out of the game, and remained alone for the next 40 years ... with only a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a distinguished appointment to the American Academy of Arts and Letters to comfort her.

Alexander Pope
Yeah, I know -- the guy responsible for the phrase "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" was a lifelong bachelor. Knock me over with a GD feather! The poet and critic never married, but confessed in letters to shacking up with his best female friend, aristocrat Martha Blount, in a "scandalous manner" that included lots of bedhopping and sneaking around manors to sleep in each other's beds.

One wonders how long-term friends-with-benefits situations worked before the era of cabs and drunk dialing.

Eudora Welty
Another Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Welty was particularly dismissive of journalists who wanted to know why she never locked it down with anybody. She notably shut down a New York Times columnist by shrugging that marriage just "never came up." He might as well have asked her why she'd never gotten into "Heroes."

She confided in a letter to her friend Katherine Anne Porter (see above) that she was still a virgin in her 30s, to which her friend replied, "You always will be." That Katherine! Such a Samantha.

Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift should have been catnip to the ladies -- he was smart and funny, loved kids, had a sexy Irish accent and hated his job. Still, he remained unmarried his whole life -- but not for lack of trying. When he was 27, Swift fell in love with a woman named Jane Waring and asked her to marry him. He told her that if she wasn't into it, he would not only eff off, he would leave the damn country. AND HE DID! He then went on to write a hilarious essay about eating babies. Lesson: Jonathan Swift was awesome.

... and so is being single. Happy Valentine's!