Does Valentine's Day revolve around a canned greeting card and as many overpriced roses as you can carry? Or just expensive jewelry and chocolate?

Countless stressed men will be scurrying around with armloads of these clichéd gifts this weekend, fear of the doghouse clouding any meaningful thought on the matter. Nobody is saying that spending time with your significant other or expressing love are wrong, but is a scripted act of anticipated affection really the answer?

No, says New York-based life coach Jay Cataldo, who is leading a movement to trash Valentine's Day in favor of more personalized expressions of meaningful feeling and sincere emotion.

"The biggest problem with Valentine's Day is that you can't really be romantic when being romantic is completely expected," Cataldo said. "So the expectations behind the holiday doom it to failure."

That's why Cataldo has advanced the idea of a new, personalized holiday to mitigate expectations or excessive fanfare motivated by the fear of being compared to someone else. Each year, it would be celebrated on a different day of the creator's choosing in order to do away with the traditional predictability of Valentine's Day.

That would be just fine with Allie Strong, a sophomore majoring in retail merchandising at the University of Minnesota.

"I would prefer the day to be a random day throughout the year because I would rather something come ... out of the blue rather than be given a Hallmark holiday, Valentine's Day card and a box of chocolates," Strong said.

College students in general tend to be skeptical of the exploitation of love for profit and question the inherent value of such a holiday.

"Holidays like Valentine's Day are a construct of really the greeting card and commercialization," said University of Minnesota junior Britta Nylen, "and if I can't be confident in the way that [my boyfriend] feels about me day to day, then why is it going to matter how he expresses that on a holiday?"

So some are calling for a boycott of the lovers' holiday, for reasons as varied as those ubiquitous candy hearts.

"Why ... don't guys have a man's day where a girl goes out and gets us beer and [stuff] like that?" said University student Alex Tideman. "It's just kind of a stupid day."

Doing away with Valentine's Day altogether will be a tough sell. But if such a notion comes to pass, that might spell the end of an old symbol of male romanticism: the knight in shining armor.

"I don't want anyone to save me. I don't need saving, I don't need to be rescued," Nylen said. "That's what these holidays are about."

James Nord is a University of Minnesota student on assignment for the Star Tribune.