Valentine’s Day: Amour than Meets the Eye?

Written by Colin Farabee.

This month, the hearts of young lovers all over the world will flutter and sigh as Valentine’s Day comes, with each aspiring romantic attempting to woo the apples of their eyes with anything they can buy, make, or find. It may come in the form of chocolate, candy hearts, a card, roses arranged with the romantic “language of flowers,” or a simple premade card, but no matter how it begins, it is a day that will start (or end!) many relationships. Many people see it as the day when they are permitted to share their feelings openly, loudly declaring their love in a traditional way. But there are so many ways to show your love for someone, and a lot of the information about their origins is inaccurate or completely made up. So let’s tackle some common ideas and symbols of Valentine’s Day and look at where each part of this adorable mishmash of a holiday came from.

First, many people already know that Valentine’s Day is a Catholic saint’s day, and that his martyrdom is not a romantic story. He was likely a priest, arrested for preaching Christianity when it was illegal in the Roman Empire, and he married many Christian couples, hence his connection to love. But this does not match up with the modern-day views of Valentine’s Day as a day for dates, romance, passion, and finding a partner. History seems to have an answer for this mismatch of beliefs, though, in the pagan holiday of Lupercalia. A pre-Roman celebration of fertility and finding love, it had more or less died out in the 6th century after many years of pressure from Catholicism.

Our story begins, however, in the 14th century, hundreds of years after Lupercalia ended, when the Roman Empire was considered mysterious and trendy. Many academics became interested and attempted to revive pieces of Roman culture that they saw as interesting, and this caught their eye. On Lupercalia, a goat was sacrificed to the god of purity and fertility, and the skin of the animal was cut into strips called “februa” (the source for the name of the month of February). Men and women were struck with the februa, believing it would bring them better fertility. This may also have been the first attempt at organized speed dating, as single men are believed to have put their names in a chalice, and any single women wanting a partner could take a name at random and try to live with their new partner. In the Middle Ages, these ideas were slowly romanticized. By 1400, it had become less about trying to have kids, and more about the courtly ideals of romantic and pure love. Despite many changes to different Western cultures since then, this newer version of the holiday has endured and shifted meanings with changing sensibilities

Now, a number of jaded individuals frequently cite Valentine’s Day as an example of everything that is soullessly manufactured by corporations for profit, from the boxes of chocolates and the pressure to give out heart-shaped gifts to the ever-present cheap greeting cards. While I am not here to argue that the robotic marketing campaigns are not at work, there are completely legitimate reasons for all of these traditions! First, I will cover the classic box of chocolates, a part of Valentine’s Day that anyone can enjoy! Every culture to encounter chocolate has thought it to be an aphrodisiac since the beginning of time. When chocolate crossed the Atlantic from South America to Europe, medieval nobles rich enough to afford the wildly expensive luxury would pay for sweet amber and chocolate confections for their wives and lovers, hoping to get lucky on its fabled properties. While of course there is no real “aphrodisiac” and its arousing properties were total fabrications, its flavor and rarity kept it popular. As chocolate remained out of the price range of the common people for centuries, when people could finally afford to imitate the rich, they did, and since then it is never decreased in popularity.

The second symbol of Valentine’s Day that I want to cover is the heart-shaped gifts. These cards and gift boxes are synonymous with love and are a traditional part of the Valentine’s Day date. What might surprise the average person is that these are rumored to have begun with St. Valentine himself and may be the only traditionally Catholic part of the celebration. St. Valentine is a very ancient figure in Catholicism and many of his deeds are part guesswork or legend. One thing many historians and Catholic accounts allege is that he gave heart-shaped emblems to the couples he secretly married, either as a way of reminding them of their obligation to one another, or as a physical token for the men to keep with them to keep them faithful. While the deeper obligations of the gift have faded from popular memory, a cursory glance at any store on February 13th will tell you that despite the nearly 1,500 years separating us from the saint, his emblem has stuck around and is still heavily associated with gifts given to a partner.

Thirdly, there are the omnipresent Hallmark cards declaring one’s love for a significant other in a hundred different ways. As the second-most popular card-sending holiday, consumers are not wrong to state that the idea is far too commercial to seem authentic or even romantic. But the humble Valentine’s card containing words of love or poetry has a more beautiful and complicated history than a generic card could convey. Lupercalia, as I mentioned earlier, was a pagan holiday and was finally fully suppressed around the year 492. It lived on, however, in the minds of many academics who began modernizing it, connecting the ideas of St. Valentine’s Christian marriages and ideas of fertility, dating, and love. Chaucer, around 1390, wrote a long poem called “The Parliament of Fowls,” which is the first recorded mention of Valentine’s Day being about love and pairing off with partners. It is frequently cited as the single work that reignited a popular interest in Valentine’s Day and tied it to resurging ideas about Lupercalia. Only 25 years later, Charles, the Duke of Orleans, is recorded as the first man to send his wife a letter with a poem proclaiming his eternal devotion and passion. While he was held captive in England in 1415 during the Hundred Years War, he sent his wife a letter declaring that he was “sick of love” since he had been held apart from the love of his life for another year. This matured and developed over centuries into a strong tradition of sending letters and declaring love on Valentine’s Day. While certain companies may have capitalized on this, they definitely did not start this beautiful custom.

If you are an adult, you probably know the feeling of rushing out to buy roses for a special date. The 12 deep-red roses every lover will dutifully provide are meant to signify “love.” While it is true that roses mean love, their meaning is actually not so simple or clear. A single red rose, as many people could guess, denotes passion and love. Multiply that by 12, however, and the meaning according to the language of flowers shifts to “gratitude.” Perhaps this is a perfect gift for a married couple, but if you wish to give 12 roses to your date, what you are saying is less romantic, and more thankful. It is also worth mentioning that playing around with the color or the flower may offend a savvy date. If your lover says their favorite color is yellow, or that they love geraniums, you should probably buy them what they love. But be aware: Giving a date yellow roses symbolizes “let’s just be friends,” and giving a Victorian man or woman geraniums would instantly tell them you think they are an idiot.

The fourth symbol I wish to address is Cupid, usually depicted as a young boy with angel wings shooting a bow with a heart-shaped arrowhead, who is a character heavily associated with Valentine’s Day. Modern references to Cupid compare true, deep love to being “shot by Cupid’s arrow.” A casual search into the history of Cupid in English and general Western European history would yield the same results as well: a cherubic and innocent young boy who leaves true love in his wake. Shakespeare would write in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that “Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind” because he believed that Cupid was an emblem of the purest and best kind of love. While he may well represent that today, his place in history is far more wanton and carnal, and makes his presence in Valentine’s Day themes far more entertaining.

Cupid to the Romans was a son of Venus, and to the Greeks he was an ancient and primal god older than their main pantheon, but he was the same force of nature to both. His arrows were lust itself, and the people struck by them were definitely not in love. They were instead desperately driven to other, more adult desires, without the ability to reason and think rationally. Even post-Roman Christian works describe him as a “demon of lust” and a force of darkness and sin. Though it will not get you into trouble today, Cupid’s past was definitely a far cry from the depictions shown today, which were mostly invented in the Middle Ages when he was combined with the image of a cherub to make him cuter and more palatable. While he is seen as an angelic force of pure love today, your ancestors would likely have considered him to be about as pure as the average conversation on a dating app.

In short, whether you call it Valentine’s Day or Lupercalia, this holiday has many rich traditions behind it that span thousands of years into the times before the Roman Empire. These collected parts created a celebration of love that has truly become an international holiday, with each tradition boasting of a rich and storied past. This Valentine’s Day, whether you are on a first date or taking out your spouse, I hope you enjoy the spirit of the holiday it has become, and spend it with a person who makes you feel great, whether that person has the right roses and chocolates or not.

Photographed by Sarah Pittman