(FORTUNE Magazine) – THIS VALENTINE'S DAY, AS some suckers are busy dropping $50 on a few lousy roses, a small but growing group of singles will be enjoying a relationship with absolutely no strings attached. The virtual girlfriend (and, occasionally, boyfriend) is technology's answer to spending a night alone.

Visit www.imaginarygirlfriends.com, and for $45 the site allows you to choose from an array of real girls. (Red-haired Karinna, for example, likes animals and watching TV.) Once the "relationship" is launched, the girl agrees to send flirty e-mails, mail handwritten letters, chat online, and even leave her boyfriend loving voicemail messages for two months. The British site www.virtual-girlfriend.net offers similar services from both fake girlfriends and boyfriends for about 16 pounds a week. (Be warned: It's a bit racier, and many of the girls--virtual or not--look as if they shouldn't be brought home to Mama.)

Men in Japan and some other Asian countries can choose to download an animated girlfriend to their cellphone screen. Love by Mail from toymaker Bandai and the just-launched V-girl from Hong Kong's Artificial Life are two options. Both programs require a suitor to romance his pixilated sweetheart with tender e-mails and, in V-girl's case, to ply her with gifts that cost the phone user real money. Should he say the wrong thing or forget an anniversary, the animated lady will give her boyfriend the silent treatment. The chairman and CEO of Artificial Life, Eberhard Schoneburg, says that the company plans to bring the service to America by the end of the year. "The attraction seems to be the novelty of the game," he says. That and the thrill of having a girlfriend who doesn't make you watch Desperate Housewives. -- Thom Holden