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Old-fashioned dating advice still holds: play hard to get to land a guy

We’re all Manti Te’o now.

It’s Valentine’s Day. If you’re a straight, single female, chances are excellent that you’ll be sitting home alone tonight with your cats, devouring an entire jumbo Whitman’s Sampler washed down with a jug of cheap chardonnay while waiting for a texted invitation to a booty call. Or more likely, a Skype or iChat from some mysterious doofus too lazy, too married or too nonexistent to actually hang out.

And that’s if you’re lucky enough to get a call.

In a seminal article published in The New York Times last month, the Paper of Record crushed the delicate hearts of women everywhere, while selling a bundle of records for heartbreak queen Taylor Swift.

The paper declared that love, romance, or even conventional cuddling with a non-monogamous partner is as dead as the long-stemmed roses in which you invested $100, only to have them shrivel and wither by the time your man texted at midnight to say that something, or someone, better came up.

“The End of Courtship?’’ the paper asked, while declaring the demise of traditional dating that involves a couple actually swapping spit. Words haven’t caused such panic in the female universe since Newsweek declared in 1986 that a woman’s chances of getting married after 40 are roughly equivalent to getting killed by a terrorist.

Conventional wisdom says it’s gotten worse.

Today, the alcohol-fueled “hookup culture,’’ roughly defined as guys getting the milk for free, is aided and abetted by Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging. Everyone’s a stalker.

The whereabouts of everybody you know, at all hours of the night or day, are an open book. And, contrary to what angry feminists say, the median income of young women today is higher than that of slacker males, giving guys a nifty excuse to expect women to pay for drinks. Then take off.

Dinner and a show? You might consider time-traveling to the 1950s, going out with a girlfriend. Or turning gay.

Is it really so hopeless?

Maybe it’s time to rewrite The Rules.

Sherrie Schneider and Ellen Fein wrote the 1995 bible “The Rules’’ and started a spinoff counseling service that teaches gals the antique notion that playing hard to get is the best way to land a guy. Up yours, NOW!

Last month, the ladies published “Not Your Mother’s Rules,’’ sort of like “The Rules,’’ except on technological steroids.

As Manti Te’o taught us, this stuff can’t be taken lightly.

Te’o claims he was “catfished’’ — that he went through an entire relationship online, from courtship to death, without once laying eyes on his lady love. As it turned out, she never existed.

In a culture in which it is possible to do everything virtually, from flirting to phone sex, Te’o is not the first to be duped.

One woman counseled by Sherrie and Ellen was in love with someone she never met.

“He canceled on her three or four times,’’ said Sherrie. “He had the flu, then surgery.

“Then she found out — he’s a woman!’’ Ouch.

The new Rules are a lot like the old ones: Don’t text first. Answer one message to every four he writes. Write fewer words than he does.

“Not Your Mother’s Rules’’ contains a handy chart that tells exactly how long to wait before answering his messages. Two to four hours for the first text. Thirty minutes thereafter. And if you do manage to meet him in the flesh, don’t give it up too quickly. Some Rules never change.

My gorgeous friend Maddie, 32, is proof positive that old-fashioned game-playing is an effective tool in the man-nabbing arsenal. In one horrific episode, she visited a man in California. And promptly got dumped.

She cooked another man an elaborate dinner. She got stuck with the bill, then she got dumped.

Now she’s engaged. And the reason is as ancient as cat-and-mouse. Maddie lost her cellphone in Bergdorf’s, and didn’t know that the guy she’d recently met was sending her messages.

By the time Maddie regained her ability to text, the man was desperate to nail her down.

Forget the Times and its bleak visions of meaningless, drunken liaisons.

“ ‘Rules’ girls get engaged. They get married,’’ said Ellen.

Some things never change.

The gall of Galliano

Idiot designer John Galliano, convicted in France of shouting “I love Hitler!’’ and other slurs, has a wicked and hurtful sense of humor.

The anti-Semite showed up at New York’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week decked out like a Hasidic Jew, complete with side curls and black hat. He wants you to think he was paying tribute to the Jewish people. Ha!

One appalled reader said that if Galliano really wants to kiss and make up, he’d do volunteer work for Jewish charities. If I were this cretin, I wouldn’t show my mug in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after dark.

Eye see a bit of danger

These patients get hammered before they’re examined. Brooklyn optometrist Dr. Justin Bazan serves beer, wine, even hard liquor, to folks undergoing exams at Park Slope Eye. And there’s no law against it.

Does someone have to lose a peeper before authorities intervene?

Another Figoski outrage

Good citizens of this city were outraged and stunned. A Brooklyn jury yesterday found Michael Velez not guilty of burglary and felony murder in the 2011 slaying of Police Officer Peter Figoski. Now Velez, accused of driving murderer Lamont Pride to the house where Figoski was shot to death, will soon go free. This came two days after another jury gave dastardly Pride a major break, convicting him of second-degree murder, not first. Now, he’ll be eligible for parole in 25 years or less.

“This case has seriously divided my family, because we have family members who make excuses for intolerable behavior and then we have the rest of us who feel the defendants need to do serious time,’’ a man related to Velez told me.

There is no justice. Not in Brooklyn.

Private school of hard knocks

I haven’t seen rich city parents so desperate since the recession hit.

Dead set on getting little Muffie or Astin into kindergarten at the über-exclusive Dalton private school on the Upper East Side, where learning ABCs costs nearly $39,000 a year, they’re subjecting their kids to public ridicule.

The school that has bred fabulous grads, from Claire Danes to Anderson Cooper, did the unthinkable. Dalton put together a list of 5-year-olds rejected by the K-12 school, and e-mailed it to alumni — so they might hit up the rejects’ families for donations, Page Six reported.

But parents of the loser tots likely won’t sue. They don’t want to hurt their chances that another snooty school might take in their kids, or that Dalton will eventually cave.

In certain ZIP codes, humiliating children and their Type-A parents is not just acceptable. It’s required.