Consider it a great relief if your boyfriend or girlfriend has been less enthusiastic about Valentine's Day than the booksellers and magazines that have been holiday hound-dogging potential customers. I've by now lost count of the many panting messages in my Gmail inbox lately—deals on this or that romantic gift (but really, a New Yorker coffee mug? could you devise a less sexy present?) or on love-related books I've never heard of. If your significant other approaches this level of enthusiasm, then you just may be in stalker territory. On the other hand, no one wants to be forgotten, but even if such an oversight occurs, then remember that it could always be worse. Readers will find ample evidence of the depths of romantic cellar dwelling in Andrew Shaffer's clever compilation Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love. And if things are looking up, then a couple of recent titles come to mind that none of those emails thought to include.

Evidence of these failed philosopher-lovers will also be found quickly because, without meaning to sound too critical, this is a slight book: the hall of shame comprises 36 philosophers, listed alphabetically. Each receives roughly three pages of attention, with a portrait taking up a separate page, and an inset quotation the good part of another. The result is basically a quotation book connected with brief biographies (dependent on the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy and Wikipedia) and sparked by witty commentary. It may be the reading equivalent of eating cheese puffs, but it is no less enjoyable for being short on substance. There's a gift-booky quality to Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love, and it would indeed make a fun gift, either ironic or strategic: as the opening epigraph by Neal Pollack has it, "It's always nice to know that no matter how badly you've screwed up your love life, someone else has done far, far worse."

Where to begin with this cast of philosophical giants and personal nitwits? You have your classroom philanderers (Abelard, Dewey, Heidegger), those domestically sketchy types (Hegel with his landlord's wife, Marx and Schopenhauer with housemaids), and the adulterers at large (Diderot, Russell, Camus, Rand). Goethe was a ball of Romantic angst, a fact writ large in The Sorrows of Young Werther (and rather belied in his Roman Elegies). Shaffer cheekily says that the "subculture of suffering" popularized by Werther was later revived by the '80s alt group The Cure. Others elicit a similar pity. If you had the love life of Schopenhauer, you would be a pessimistic philosopher, too. Courting the 17-year-old Flora Weiss, the 43-year-old philosopher approached her at a party, bearing grapes. They were not well received: "I didn't want the grapes because old Schopenhauer had touched them," she wrote in her diary.

The Greek philosophers don't come off so well: Aristotle thought women had fewer teeth than men, and the malcontent Diogenes, discounting marriage, lamented that "humans have complicated every simple gift from the gods." He meant sex. He advocated multiple partners, but apparently was more likely to pleasure himself in public. Later, Marx and Engels would speak of "Protestant monogamy" as "leaden boredom." Then there's Socrates and Xanthippe, among the most famous bad marriages in history. For Chaucer and Shakespeare, Xanthippe was the archetypal shrewish wife, and apparently there is now an actual species of shrew named after her. Who says philosophy, or being married to a philosopher, does not bestow immortality?

The Romans fare no better. Seneca the Younger was banished from Rome for having an affair with the emperor's niece, half his age. Lucretius—recipient of this year's "Comeback Player of the Year" award among ancient authors, thanks to Stephen Greenblatt's book The Swerve—approved of sex, but thought love would inevitably relegate Roman male virtus to servitude. Men would, he writes, lose their money, "wasted on Babylonian coverlets."

There are plenty of surprising details here, even amid these brief treatments. Quotations from Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus helpfully separate the author from the later, popular notion of "platonic love," and who knew that Descartes felt a special attraction toward cross-eyed women? Kant viewed premarital sex as akin to enslavement, and Swedenborg liked to philosophize about angel sex. (The result was not carnal pleasure but "celestial sweets.") Rousseau sometimes flashed women. ("The more sensible pretended they had seen nothing," he writes, with seemingly no sense of irony, in Confessions. "Others started laughing.") Camus seemed to push away love because of the prospect of having to age with the beloved.